SAP-C02 Practice Question: Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
A company is modernizing a monolithic application into microservices on Amazon ECS. They want to decouple services and improve resilience. Which AWS service should they use for asynchronous communication between microservices?
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 provides a fully managed message queue for asynchronous communication, decoupling services. Option B (Amazon Kinesis Data Streams) is for streaming data. Option C (Amazon API Gateway) is for synchronous REST APIs. Option D (Amazon SNS) is pub/sub, not point-to-point queue.
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 SQS
Why this is correct
Amazon SQS provides fully managed, durable queues that decouple producers from consumers, letting microservices communicate asynchronously without waiting on each other. This directly satisfies the resilience requirement: if a consumer fails or scales slowly, messages persist in the queue rather than being lost, absorbing traffic spikes.
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Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams is a shard-based streaming ingestion service for ordered, replayable records at scale, not a managed publish/subscribe message broker with per-message acknowledgement and dead-letter handling. Amazon SQS provides that decoupling. Tempting for high-throughput event pipelines, where Kinesis is the right pick.
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Amazon API Gateway
Why it's wrong here
API Gateway is a synchronous request/response front door for HTTP APIs; it invokes backends and waits, so it does not decouple services asynchronously. Amazon SQS inserts a durable queue between producer and consumer. Tempting because API Gateway fronts microservices, but it is the wrong axis for asynchronous messaging.
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Amazon SNS
Why it's wrong here
SNS is a pub/sub fan-out service that pushes to subscribers; it does not retain messages for a consumer to poll, so it cannot buffer work when a microservice is unavailable. Amazon SQS queues provide that durability. Tempting because SNS decouples publishers from subscribers, but it suits notification fan-out rather than point-to-point work queues.
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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.