SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new serverless data processing pipeline. The pipeline uses AWS Lambda to process records from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. The company wants to ensure that failed records are automatically retried and sent to a dead-letter queue after three failed attempts. Which configuration should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse the Lambda function's dead-letter queue (DLQ) property, which only works for asynchronous invocations, with the on-failure destination on event source mappings, which is the correct configuration for stream-based sources like Kinesis.
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
✓
Configure an on-failure destination on the Kinesis event source mapping to send records to an SQS queue.
The on-failure destination on a Kinesis event source mapping allows you to specify an SQS queue to which records are sent after a configurable number of retry attempts (default is 3). This is the native mechanism for handling failed records in a Lambda-Kinesis integration, providing automatic retries and dead-letter queue behavior without custom code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure the Kinesis stream to send failed records to an SQS standard queue.
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis does not directly send failed records to SQS; the Lambda event source mapping handles retries.
- ✓
Configure an on-failure destination on the Kinesis event source mapping to send records to an SQS queue.
Why this is correct
The event source mapping for Kinesis supports an on-failure destination for DLQ.
- ✗
Configure the Lambda function's dead-letter queue property with an SQS queue.
Why it's wrong here
The DLQ property is for async invocations, not for stream-based event sources.
- ✗
Configure a Lambda destination on the function to send events to an SQS queue.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda destinations are for async invocation results, not for Kinesis event source mapping.
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 |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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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.