AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 653

A company's application integrates with multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) sources for data collection. The company runs Amazon EC2 instances to receive the data and to upload the data to an Amazon S3 bucket for analysis. The same EC2 instance that receives and uploads the data also sends a notification to the user when an upload is complete. The company has noticed slow application performance and wants to improve the performance as much as possible.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create an Auto Scaling group so that EC2 instances can scale out. Configure an S3 event notification to send events to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic when the upload to the S3 bucket is complete.
• B. Create an Amazon AppFlow flow to transfer data between each SaaS source and the S3 bucket. Configure an S3 event notification to send events to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic when the upload to the S3 bucket is complete.
• C. Create an Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) rule for each SaaS source to send output data. Configure the S3 bucket as the rule's target. Create a second EventBridge (CloudWatch Events) rule to send events when the upload to the S3 bucket is complete. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic as the second rule's target.
• D. Create a Docker container to use instead of an EC2 instance. Host the containerized application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Configure Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights to send events to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic when the upload to the S3 bucket is complete.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon AppFlow is a fully managed integration service that automates bidirectional data transfers between SaaS applications and AWS services like Amazon S3, completely eliminating the need to manage underlying compute resources like EC2 or ECS. Utilizing S3 event notifications paired with Amazon SNS offloads the notification logic from the application tier, maximizing performance. Other options require maintaining either virtual machines, container tasks, or custom EventBridge routing, which increases operational overhead.