SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is migrating a monolithic e-commerce application to AWS. The application consists of a web tier, an application tier, and a database tier. The company wants to decouple the tiers to improve scalability and resilience. Which AWS service should the company use to send messages from the web tier to the application tier asynchronously?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse SNS (pub/sub push model) with SQS (queue pull model) for decoupling tiers, but SNS does not provide the buffering and independent consumption needed for asynchronous decoupling between a web tier and an application tier.
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 SQS
Amazon SQS is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed message queuing service that enables asynchronous communication between decoupled application tiers. The web tier can send messages to an SQS queue, and the application tier can poll and process those messages independently, which improves scalability and resilience by allowing each tier to scale and fail independently.
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 SNS
Why it's wrong here
SNS is a pub/sub messaging service, not a queue, and does not provide asynchronous decoupling with message retention.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis is designed for real-time streaming of large data, not for simple message queuing between tiers.
- ✗
AWS Step Functions
Why it's wrong here
Step Functions is a workflow orchestration service, not a message queue.
- ✓
Amazon SQS
Why this is correct
SQS provides a reliable, scalable, and fully managed message queue that decouples web and application tiers.
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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.