SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A financial services company is designing a solution to process real-time stock trade data. The data is ingested via Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with a shard count of 10. Each shard receives 500 records per second, each record is 1 KB. The company needs to archive all raw data to Amazon S3 within 5 minutes of receipt and also run a Lambda function to enrich each record. What is the most cost-effective and scalable approach?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume Lambda is the simplest way to process Kinesis streams, but they overlook Firehose's built-in Lambda integration and its ability to handle high-throughput archiving without custom scaling logic.
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
✓
Configure Kinesis Data Firehose to read from the stream and deliver to S3, and use a Lambda function for enrichment.
Kinesis Data Firehose can directly subscribe to a Kinesis Data Stream as its source, automatically reading all records from the stream and delivering them to S3 with a configurable buffer interval (e.g., 60 seconds), easily meeting the 5-minute requirement. For enrichment, Firehose can invoke a Lambda function on each incoming record before delivery, making this a fully managed, serverless pipeline that scales without manual shard management or custom code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Configure Kinesis Data Firehose to read from the stream and deliver to S3, and use a Lambda function for enrichment.
Why this is correct
Firehose handles buffering and delivery to S3; Lambda enriches records.
- ✗
Use Kinesis Data Analytics to archive data to S3.
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Analytics is for real-time analytics, not archiving.
- ✗
Use the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) to process records and write to S3.
Why it's wrong here
KCL requires managing compute resources and is less cost-effective.
- ✗
Use a Lambda function to read from the stream and write to S3.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda may struggle with high throughput and concurrency.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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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.