SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company wants to decouple a microservices architecture where one service (producer) sends events to another service (consumer). The producer can generate bursts of events, and the consumer processes them in batches. The solution must be serverless and handle potential consumer failures without losing events. Which AWS service should be used as the message broker?
⚠ Common exam trap
SAP-C02 often tests the confusion between SNS (push, no buffering) and SQS (pull, buffered queue), leading candidates to choose SNS for decoupling when message persistence and failure handling are required.
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 a fully managed, serverless message queue that decouples producers and consumers, buffers bursts, and supports batch processing. It provides at-least-once delivery and, with a standard queue, high throughput; messages persist until successfully processed, so consumer failures do not lose events. These characteristics match the requirement for a serverless broker that handles bursts and failures.
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
Amazon SNS is a pub/sub fan-out service that pushes messages to subscribers and does not retain them, so a failed consumer loses events. It is tempting because it decouples producers from consumers, but the scenario needs durable buffering and batch retrieval, which Amazon SQS provides.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams requires provisioned or on-demand shards and consumers track shard iterators; a failed batch consumer resumes from a checkpoint, but the service is not natively serverless in the same event-driven sense. It is tempting for ordered streaming ingestion, yet the stem's decoupled batch consumption with automatic retry points to a queue.
- ✗
Amazon EventBridge
Why it's wrong here
EventBridge routes events to targets using rules and event buses, but it does not retain messages for a consumer to poll in batches, and failed deliveries are not automatically redelivered for reprocessing. It is tempting because it decouples producers from consumers, yet that is event routing, not durable queue-based buffering.
- ✓
Amazon SQS
Why this is correct
Amazon SQS is serverless, buffers bursty producer traffic, and retains messages until the consumer deletes them, so failed batches are retried rather than lost. It decouples the services and satisfies the no-event-loss requirement, unlike a synchronous invocation model.
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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JA
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.