SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. Each microservice must be independently deployable and scalable. The company expects unpredictable traffic patterns with sudden spikes. Which combination of AWS services should be used to build a decoupled, resilient system?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to choose Kinesis Data Streams (Option C) thinking it provides better decoupling, but they overlook that SQS is specifically designed for asynchronous message buffering with per-message visibility timeouts, which is more appropriate for microservices decoupling than Kinesis's shard-based streaming model.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudWatch.
It combines API Gateway as a managed entry point, Lambda for stateless compute, SQS for decoupling and buffering sudden traffic spikes, DynamoDB for serverless NoSQL storage, and CloudWatch for observability. This serverless stack ensures each microservice is independently deployable and scales automatically without provisioning, handling unpredictable spikes via SQS queue depth and Lambda concurrency limits.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon CloudWatch.
Why this is correct
API Gateway fronts requests, Lambda scales per-invocation for sudden spikes, SQS decouples producers from consumers, DynamoDB provides scalable persistence, and CloudWatch supplies observability. This combination delivers independent deployability and resilience, satisfying the decoupled architecture and unpredictable-traffic constraints.
- ✗
Use Application Load Balancer, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon SQS, and Amazon RDS.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS provides a relational database with limited horizontal write scaling, and EC2 Auto Scaling alone does not decouple services. SQS does decouple, but the stem requires independently deployable, scalable microservices with spiky traffic; RDS becomes the bottleneck. This combination suits traditional three-tier web applications.
- ✗
Use Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and Amazon DynamoDB.
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams is designed for ordered, replayable streaming ingestion and analytics, not request-response microservice decoupling. API Gateway, Lambda and DynamoDB fit serverless microservices, but Kinesis adds stream-processing semantics where SQS or EventBridge queuing suits unpredictable request spikes. Kinesis is tempting because it also absorbs high throughput.
- ✗
Use Application Load Balancer, Amazon ECS with Fargate, Amazon SQS, and Amazon RDS with read replicas.
Why it's wrong here
This option fails because Amazon RDS, despite read replicas, is a relational database that can become a shared, monolithic data store across microservices, hindering their independent deployability and scalability due to tight coupling at the data layer. The scenario explicitly requires each microservice to be independently deployable and scalable, which RDS typically obstructs. However, this combination is tempting as RDS is a robust managed database, and read replicas do enhance read performance, making it suitable for applications needing a relational backend and some read scaling, particularly for more traditional or less strictly decoupled architectures.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the SAP-C02 exam.