SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new solution to process streaming data from IoT devices. The data must be ingested, processed in real-time, and stored in a data warehouse for analytics. The company expects millions of events per second. Which combination of AWS services should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
The SAP-C02 exam often tests the distinction between Kinesis Data Streams (real-time, sub-second) and Kinesis Data Firehose (near-real-time, minutes of latency), leading candidates to choose Firehose for real-time requirements.
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 for ingestion, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time processing, and Amazon S3 as a staging area before loading into Amazon Redshift.
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams can ingest millions of events per second with durable, ordered shards, while Kinesis Data Analytics provides real-time SQL or Apache Flink processing on the stream. Amazon S3 acts as a staging layer before loading into Amazon Redshift via COPY or Redshift Spectrum, enabling scalable analytics without throttling the ingestion pipeline.
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 Firehose for ingestion and delivery to Amazon S3, then use AWS Glue for ETL into Amazon Redshift.
Why it's wrong here
Firehose buffers data before delivering to S3, so events are not processed in real time; Glue then runs batch ETL jobs on a schedule. It would suit micro-batch analytics pipelines where near-real-time latency is acceptable, but not the stem's real-time processing requirement.
- ✗
Amazon DynamoDB Streams for ingestion, AWS Lambda for processing, and Amazon Redshift for storage.
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB Streams only captures item-level changes from a DynamoDB table, so it cannot ingest IoT device events directly at millions per second. It is the right choice for reacting to table writes, such as triggering Lambda on new records.
- ✗
Amazon SQS for ingestion, AWS Lambda for processing, and Amazon DynamoDB for storage.
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a message queue, not a streaming ingestion service, and DynamoDB is a NoSQL database rather than a data warehouse. This combination suits decoupled application messaging with key-value storage, not real-time analytics ingestion into a warehouse.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for ingestion, Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for real-time processing, and Amazon S3 as a staging area before loading into Amazon Redshift.
Why this is correct
Kinesis Data Streams sustains millions of events per second with ordered, replayable ingestion, while Kinesis Data Analytics performs real-time SQL/Flink processing. S3 stages the processed output before Redshift's columnar load, satisfying the real-time processing and warehousing constraints without provisioning servers.
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 |
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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.