AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 402

A company has thousands of edge devices that collectively generate 1 TB of status alerts each day. Each alert is approximately 2 KB in size. A solutions architect needs to implement a solution to ingest and store the alerts for future analysis.
The company wants a highly available solution. However, the company needs to minimize costs and does not want to manage additional infrastructure.
Additionally, the company wants to keep 14 days of data available for immediate analysis and archive any data older than 14 days.
What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to ingest the alerts. Configure the Kinesis Data Firehose stream to deliver the alerts to an Amazon S3 bucket. Set up an S3 Lifecycle configuration to transition data to Amazon S3 Glacier after 14 days.
• B. Launch Amazon EC2 instances across two Availability Zones and place them behind an Elastic Load Balancer to ingest the alerts. Create a script on the EC2 instances that will store the alerts in an Amazon S3 bucket. Set up an S3 Lifecycle configuration to transition data to Amazon S3 Glacier after 14 days.
• C. Create an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to ingest the alerts. Configure the Kinesis Data Firehose stream to deliver the alerts to an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. Set up the Amazon ES cluster to take manual snapshots every day and delete data from the cluster that is older than 14 days.
• D. Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) standard queue to ingest the alerts, and set the message retention period to 14 days. Configure consumers to poll the SQS queue, check the age of the message, and analyze the message data as needed. If the message is 14 days old, the consumer should copy the message to an Amazon S3 bucket and delete the message from the SQS queue.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed, serverless service that can easily scale to ingest 1 TB of daily alerts and deliver them directly to Amazon S3 without any infrastructure management. Once in S3, S3 Lifecycle policies can automatically and cost-effectively transition data older than 14 days to Amazon S3 Glacier for long-term archiving. Other options are less operationally efficient because they require managing EC2 instances, provisioning an Amazon ES cluster, or writing complex polling logic for SQS consumers.