SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing an event-driven architecture using Amazon EventBridge. They have multiple AWS accounts that need to receive events from a central account. What is the MOST scalable and secure way to route events to these accounts?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates default to SNS or SQS for cross-account messaging, but EventBridge's native cross-account event bus feature is specifically designed for this use case and is more scalable and secure because it uses resource-based policies and avoids intermediate services.
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
✓
Use Amazon EventBridge cross-account event buses in each target account
Amazon EventBridge cross-account event buses allow a central account to route events directly to event buses in target accounts using resource-based policies. This approach is serverless, fully managed, and scales horizontally without any intermediate components, making it the most scalable and secure solution. It avoids the complexity and potential bottlenecks of Lambda invocations, Kinesis stream management, or SNS-to-SQS fan-out across accounts.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Amazon EventBridge cross-account event buses in each target account
Why this is correct
Cross-account event buses let the central account publish events that each target account's bus receives via resource-based policies, avoiding per-account polling or fan-out infrastructure. This satisfies the scalability and security constraints through native, policy-scoped cross-account delivery.
- ✗
Publish events to an AWS Lambda function in each target account
Why it's wrong here
Lambda invocation per target account introduces custom fan-out code, per-account IAM roles and retry handling, so scaling to many accounts multiplies operational overhead and failure surface. It is tempting because Lambda is the standard compute target for event processing, and would suit transforming or enriching events before delivery, not cross-account routing.
- ✗
Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with cross-account access
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams delivers a pull-based ordered log, not cross-account event routing; consumers must poll and manage shards, and EventBridge rules cannot target a stream in another account natively. It is tempting because Kinesis handles high-throughput streaming, and would be correct for real-time analytics pipelines rather than account-to-account event distribution.
- ✗
Create an Amazon SNS topic in the central account and subscribe SQS queues in each target account
Why it's wrong here
SNS-to-SQS fanout delivers to queues, not EventBridge event buses, so cross-account targets lose EventBridge's native bus-to-bus routing, filtering and schema registry. It is tempting because SNS fanout is the classic pattern for pushing one message to many subscriber queues within or across accounts.
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
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.