SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new real-time analytics platform that ingests millions of events per second from IoT devices. The events must be processed with low latency (under 100 ms) and stored for replay. The company wants to use managed services. Which combination of AWS services should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Kinesis Data Firehose (which is near-real-time with batching) with Kinesis Data Streams (which is true real-time), or assume SQS can handle high-throughput streaming with replay, but SQS lacks ordered delivery and long-term retention for replay.
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
✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams + AWS Lambda
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams can ingest and buffer millions of events per second with sub-100 ms latency, and AWS Lambda can process each record in near real-time as it arrives in the stream. This combination meets the low-latency requirement and allows events to be replayed from the stream's retention window (up to 365 days with extended retention).
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams + AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
Kinesis Data Streams provides low-latency ingestion with replay capability; Lambda processes records in real time.
- ✗
Amazon S3 + AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
S3 is object storage, not a real-time ingestion stream; it cannot meet sub-100 ms latency for millions of events.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose + Amazon Redshift
Why it's wrong here
Firehose does not support replay; Redshift is a data warehouse not for real-time processing.
- ✗
Amazon SQS + AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a message queue, but it is not optimized for high-throughput streaming with replay.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on SAP-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is designing a real-time analytics pipeline to process streaming data from IoT devices. The solution must be serverless and handle data transformation before storage. Which combination of services is most cost-effective?
medium- ✓ A.Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to Amazon S3
- B.Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon EC2 instances for transformation, and Amazon S3
- C.Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon S3
- D.Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time SQL and Amazon S3
Why A: It combines Kinesis Data Streams for real-time ingestion, AWS Lambda for serverless data transformation, and Kinesis Data Firehose to buffer and deliver transformed data to Amazon S3. This architecture is serverless, scales automatically, and is cost-effective as you pay only for data throughput and compute time without provisioning any servers.
JA
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.