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
Step Functions orchestrates a single workflow with one execution path; it cannot fan the same event out to multiple independent consumers each processing every event. It is tempting because Step Functions coordinates multi-step serverless processes, which suits orchestration rather than event routing.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams requires consumers to manage shards, checkpoints and polling, and each record is read once per shard iterator rather than pushed to independent services. It is tempting because Kinesis handles high-throughput streaming ingestion, which suits analytics pipelines rather than event routing.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
SQS is point-to-point: each message is consumed by one consumer and deleted, so multiple downstream services cannot each process every event. It is tempting because SQS decouples producers from consumers reliably, which suits a single worker pool draining a queue.
- ✓
Amazon EventBridge
Why this is correct
Amazon EventBridge routes each event to multiple targets, with rules matching an event bus and fanning out to every subscribed downstream service independently. This satisfies the requirement that each service processes every event, since EventBridge delivers to all matching targets rather than competing consumers pulling from a shared queue.
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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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.