AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 485

A gaming company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store user information such as geographic location, player data, and leaderboards. The company needs to configure continuous backups to an Amazon S3 bucket with a minimal amount of coding. The backups must not affect availability of the application and must not affect the read capacity units (RCUs) that are defined for the table.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use an Amazon EMR cluster. Create an Apache Hive job to back up the data to Amazon S3.
• B. Export the data directly from DynamoDB to Amazon S3 with continuous backups. Turn on point-in-time recovery for the table.
• C. Configure Amazon DynamoDB Streams. Create an AWS Lambda function to consume the stream and export the data to an Amazon S3 bucket.
• D. Create an AWS Lambda function to export the data from the database tables to Amazon S3 on a regular basis. Turn on point-in-time recovery for the table.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Exporting DynamoDB data directly to Amazon S3 using Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) is a native feature that requires zero coding and does not consume any table RCUs or affect application performance. Options A, C, and D are incorrect because they require writing custom code (such as Hive jobs or AWS Lambda functions) and scanning the table or processing streams, which increases operational complexity and potentially impacts table capacity.