AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 46

A solutions architect is designing the cloud architecture for a new application being deployed on AWS. The process should run in parallel while adding and removing application nodes as needed based on the number of jobs to be processed. The processor application is stateless. The solutions architect must ensure that the application is loosely coupled and the job items are durably stored.
Which design should the solutions architect use?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon SNS topic to send the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch configuration that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch configuration. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on CPU usage.
• B. Create an Amazon SQS queue to hold the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch configuration that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch configuration. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on network usage.
• C. Create an Amazon SQS queue to hold the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch template that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch template. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on the number of items in the SQS queue.
• D. Create an Amazon SNS topic to send the jobs that need to be processed. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that consists of the processor application. Create a launch template that uses the AMI. Create an Auto Scaling group using the launch template. Set the scaling policy for the Auto Scaling group to add and remove nodes based on the number of messages published to the SNS topic.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because it uses an Amazon SQS queue to ensure that jobs are durably stored and allows for flexible processing by the stateless processor application. Options A and D use Amazon SNS, which is not ideal for durable job storage, while option B relies on network usage for scaling, which may not accurately reflect the workload compared to queue length.