AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 247

A company has an application that ingests incoming messages. These messages are then quickly consumed by dozens of other applications and microservices.
The number of messages varies drastically and sometimes spikes as high as 100,000 each second. The company wants to decouple the solution and increase scalability.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Persist the messages to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. All the applications will read and process the messages.
• B. Deploy the application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group, which scales the number of EC2 instances based on CPU metrics.
• C. Write the messages to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with a single shard. All applications will read from the stream and process the messages.
• D. Publish the messages to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic with one or more Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) subscriptions. All applications then process the messages from the queues.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

The correct answer, D, allows for decoupling and scalability by using Amazon SNS and SQS, where messages can be published to a topic and delivered to multiple queues for processing by various applications. Option A does not provide proper decoupling or handle the message spike effectively. Option B focuses on scaling EC2 instances but does not address message decoupling. Option C, while it uses Kinesis, fails to accommodate the significant volume of messages with a single shard, which could lead to throttling.