SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new system to ingest and process real-time streaming data from thousands of IoT devices. The system must be able to handle variable throughput and provide durable storage for the data. The data will be processed by a Lambda function and then stored in Amazon S3. Which two services should be used together to build this ingestion pipeline?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Kinesis Data Firehose with Kinesis Data Streams, assuming Firehose's direct S3 delivery is sufficient, but they miss that Firehose cannot trigger Lambda per-record processing and lacks the durable, replayable stream storage required for real-time IoT ingestion with Lambda.
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
✓
AWS Lambda
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (Option D) is the correct ingestion service because it provides durable, real-time data streaming with shard-level persistence for up to 365 days, enabling Lambda to process records in near real-time with at-least-once delivery semantics. AWS Lambda (Option A) is the correct processing service because it can be configured as a consumer of the Kinesis stream via event source mapping, scaling automatically with the number of shards to handle variable throughput without managing servers.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
Can process records from Kinesis Data Streams in near real-time.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Why it's wrong here
Firehose is for delivery to destinations, not for real-time processing with Lambda.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
SQS is for message queuing, not streaming.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why this is correct
Provides scalable, durable streaming ingestion.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Why it's wrong here
SNS is for pub/sub messaging, not 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 |
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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.