SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company is designing a serverless event-driven architecture using AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon DynamoDB. The architecture must handle sudden spikes in traffic without losing events. Which configuration ensures the highest reliability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse scalability features (like DynamoDB on-demand or Lambda concurrency) with reliability mechanisms for message processing, overlooking that a dead-letter queue is the specific AWS-recommended pattern to prevent event loss in SQS-based architectures.
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 SQS dead-letter queue for failed messages.
An SQS dead-letter queue (DLQ) captures messages that cannot be processed successfully after the maximum retries are exhausted, preventing event loss during traffic spikes. This ensures that failed messages are preserved for later analysis or reprocessing, which is critical for reliability in a serverless event-driven architecture.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the SQS visibility timeout to 30 minutes.
Why it's wrong here
Does not prevent loss; only delays retries.
- ✗
Use DynamoDB on-demand capacity mode.
Why it's wrong here
On-demand handles spikes but does not prevent SQS message loss.
- ✓
Configure an SQS dead-letter queue for failed messages.
Why this is correct
DLQ captures messages that cannot be processed, ensuring no data loss.
- ✗
Set Lambda reserved concurrency to a low value to control costs.
Why it's wrong here
Reserved concurrency can throttle and cause message loss.
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 |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAP-C02 question from scratch — 1,660 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.