AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 386

A mobile gaming company runs application servers on Amazon EC2 instances. The servers receive updates from players every 15 minutes. The mobile game creates a JSON object of the progress made in the game since the last update, and sends the JSON object to an Application Load Balancer. As the mobile game is played, game updates are being lost. The company wants to create a durable way to get the updates in older.
What should a solutions architect recommend to decouple the system?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to capture the data and store the JSON object in Amazon S3.
• B. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to capture the data and store the JSON object in Amazon S3.
• C. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) FIFO queues to capture the data and EC2 instances to process the messages in the queue.
• D. Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to capture the data and EC2 instances to process the messages sent to the Application Load Balancer.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon SQS FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues are ideal for this scenario because they guarantee strict message ordering and ensure that messages are processed exactly once, which prevents data loss and maintains correct player history. Using SQS effectively decouples the game clients from the backend processing servers, allowing EC2 instances to pull and process messages at their own pace. Other services like SNS do not guarantee ordered delivery in this manner, and Kinesis options do not natively integrate with the EC2 processing layer to decouple the system as cleanly as SQS FIFO.