AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 367

An ecommerce company is building a distributed application that involves several serverless functions and AWS services to complete order-processing tasks. These tasks require manual approvals as part of the workflow. A solutions architect needs to design an architecture for the order-processing application. The solution must be able to combine multiple AWS Lambda functions into responsive serverless applications. The solution also must orchestrate data and services that run on Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or on-premises servers.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Step Functions to build the application.
• B. Integrate all the application components in an AWS Glue job.
• C. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to build the application.
• D. Use AWS Lambda functions and Amazon EventBridge events to build the application.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Step Functions is a fully managed workflow service that natively supports state management, service orchestration across various platforms (including on-premises and EC2), and built-in human approval steps with minimal operational overhead. Options involving Amazon SQS or EventBridge with AWS Lambda would require complex, custom-coded state machines to handle manual approvals, significantly increasing maintenance efforts. AWS Glue is designed for ETL data integration tasks rather than orchestrating general-purpose distributed application workflows.