SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
This SAP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of design for new solutions. Match the stated requirement to the specific cloud service, access model, or configuration option — many options are valid in isolation but not for this scenario. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
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?
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).
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
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.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often 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.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Kinesis Data Streams uses shards to scale throughput, with each shard supporting up to 1,000 records per second for writes and 5 transactions per second for reads; Lambda can poll shards in parallel using event source mappings, processing records in batches with a maximum concurrency of 1,000 per account. The 100 ms latency target is achievable because Lambda invokes within milliseconds of a record appearing in the stream, and the stream's retention period (default 24 hours, up to 365 days) enables replay without additional storage.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Design for New Solutions — This question tests Design for New Solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: 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).
What should I do if I get this SAP-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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