SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company wants to design a serverless event-driven architecture where multiple downstream services need to process events from a single source. Events must be reliably delivered and each downstream service must process every event independently. Which AWS service should be used as the event router?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Amazon SQS or Kinesis as a fan-out solution, but SQS is point-to-point and Kinesis requires custom consumer logic, whereas EventBridge natively supports independent, reliable event routing to multiple targets without additional infrastructure.
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 EventBridge
Amazon EventBridge is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed event bus that can receive events from a single source and fan out to multiple downstream targets (e.g., Lambda, SQS, Step Functions) with built-in filtering, transformation, and reliable delivery. Each downstream service subscribes independently via rules, ensuring every event is processed by all subscribers without the need for a polling mechanism or manual orchestration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Step Functions
Why it's wrong here
AWS Step Functions is a workflow orchestration service, not designed for event broadcasting to multiple targets.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is for streaming data, but each shard is processed by one consumer; to broadcast, you would need multiple consumer applications, which is less efficient.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
Amazon SQS is a message queue that delivers each message to a single consumer. It does not support broadcasting to multiple independent consumers.
- ✓
Amazon EventBridge
Why this is correct
Amazon EventBridge allows you to create rules that send events to multiple targets (e.g., Lambda, SQS, SNS, Step Functions) simultaneously, enabling independent processing.
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 |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
One of 1,660 original SAP-C02 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.