SAP-C02 Practice Question: Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
A company is migrating a large-scale Apache Kafka cluster to Amazon MSK. The cluster has 100 topics with high throughput. The team wants to minimize operational overhead and ensure high availability. Which configuration should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
SAP-C02 often tests the misconception that any streaming service is interchangeable with Kafka — candidates pick Kinesis or SQS for a 'Kafka migration,' missing that only MSK preserves Kafka APIs and semantics while providing managed HA across AZs.
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
✓
Provision an Amazon MSK cluster with 3 brokers per AZ across 3 AZs.
Amazon MSK is the managed Kafka service that minimizes operational overhead while providing high availability when brokers are spread across multiple Availability Zones. Provisioning 3 brokers per AZ across 3 AZs gives replication factor and rack-awareness that survive an AZ failure, and MSK handles patching, broker replacement, and monitoring. This directly matches the requirement to migrate a large Kafka cluster with minimal ops overhead and HA.
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 Kinesis Data Streams with enhanced fan-out.
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams is a proprietary streaming service, not Kafka; it cannot host existing Kafka topics, producers or consumers without rewriting them. It is tempting because it offers managed streaming with high throughput, and would be correct for new applications built natively on Kinesis rather than migrated Kafka clusters.
- ✗
Use Amazon SQS FIFO queues with message deduplication.
Why it's wrong here
SQS FIFO is a queue, not a publish-subscribe streaming platform; it lacks Kafka topics, partitions and consumer groups, so 100 Kafka topics cannot map onto it. It is tempting because it is fully managed and offers deduplication, and would be correct for decoupling point-to-point messaging workloads, not Kafka migration.
- ✗
Deploy Apache Kafka on Amazon EC2 with Spot Instances and EBS volumes.
Why it's wrong here
Self-managed Kafka on EC2 with Spot Instances reintroduces patching, broker scaling and rebalancing overhead, and Spot interruptions threaten availability. It is tempting because it gives full control over broker configuration, and would be correct when specific Kafka versions or plugins are unsupported by Amazon MSK.
- ✓
Provision an Amazon MSK cluster with 3 brokers per AZ across 3 AZs.
Why this is correct
Spreading three brokers per Availability Zone across three AZs gives replication factor tolerance and automatic broker failover, meeting the high-availability requirement. Distributing partitions across nine brokers also absorbs the high throughput of 100 topics while MSK manages patching and recovery, minimising operational overhead.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.