AWS Certified Developer – Associate — Question 382

A company created an application to consume and process data. The application uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and AWS Lambda functions. The application is currently working as expected, but it occasionally receives several messages that it cannot process properly. The company needs to clear these messages to prevent the queue from becoming blocked.
A developer must implement a solution that makes queue processing always operational. The solution must give the company the ability to defer the messages with errors and save these messages for further analysis.
What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Configure Amazon CloudWatch Logs to save the error messages to a separate log stream.
• B. Create a new SQS queue. Set the new queue as a dead-letter queue for the application queue. Configure the Maximum Receives setting.
• C. Change the SQS queue to a FIFO queue. Configure the message retention period to 0 seconds.
• D. Configure an Amazon CloudWatch alarm for Lambda function errors. Publish messages to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic to notify administrator users.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Configuring an Amazon SQS dead-letter queue (DLQ) with a Maximum Receives setting is the standard AWS best practice to handle processing failures efficiently. This approach isolates problematic messages automatically after a set number of retries, preventing queue head-of-line blocking while preserving the messages for debugging. Other options either do not unblock the queue, delete the messages entirely, or require manual intervention.