SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new solution to ingest real-time clickstream data from a website. The data volume varies from 100 to 100,000 events per second. The solution must buffer the data for up to 5 minutes and then deliver it to Amazon S3 for analysis. The company wants to minimize operational overhead and cost. Which service should be used to buffer the data?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Kinesis Data Streams (which requires custom consumers and scaling management) with Kinesis Data Firehose (which is purpose-built for buffering and automated delivery to S3), leading them to choose the more complex option A.
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 Firehose
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the correct choice because it is a fully managed service designed to ingest streaming data, buffer it for configurable durations (up to 15 minutes by default, but easily set to 5 minutes), and automatically deliver it to destinations like Amazon S3. It handles variable data volumes (100 to 100,000 events per second) without requiring manual scaling, minimizing operational overhead and cost compared to alternatives.
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
Why it's wrong here
Requires managing shards and consumers.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda is not a buffer service.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Why this is correct
Firehose provides serverless buffering and delivery to S3.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
SQS is not optimized for high-throughput streaming.
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.