AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) — Question 356

A developer has an application that uses an Amazon DynamoDB table with a configured local secondary index (LSI). During application testing, the DynamoDB table metrics report a ProvisionedThroughputExceededException error message. The number of requests made by the test suite did not exceed the table's provisioned capacity limits.

What is the cause of this issue?

Answer options

• A. The data in the table's partition key column is not evenly distributed.
• B. The LSI's capacity is different from the table's capacity.
• C. The application is not implementing exponential backoff retry logic while interacting with the DynamoDB API.
• D. The application has the IAM permission to query the DynamoDB table but not to query the LSI.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

A local secondary index (LSI) shares the provisioned read and write capacity of the base table, and all operations on a partition key and its LSI are limited by the capacity of that single partition. If data is unevenly distributed, a 'hot partition' can occur, leading to a ProvisionedThroughputExceededException even if the total table-level throughput is not exceeded. Incorrect IAM permissions would cause an AccessDeniedException instead, LSIs do not have separate capacity settings, and missing backoff logic only affects how the application handles the error, not why the error occurs.