AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 694

A company is developing a mobile game that streams score updates to a backend processor and then posts results on a leaderboard. A solutions architect needs to design a solution that can handle large traffic spikes, process the mobile game updates in order of receipt, and store the processed updates in a highly available database. The company also wants to minimize the management overhead required to maintain the solution.

What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Push score updates to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Process the updates in Kinesis Data Streams with AWS Lambda. Store the processed updates in Amazon DynamoDB.
• B. Push score updates to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Process the updates with a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances set up for Auto Scaling. Store the processed updates in Amazon Redshift.
• C. Push score updates to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Subscribe an AWS Lambda function to the SNS topic to process the updates. Store the processed updates in a SQL database running on Amazon EC2.
• D. Push score updates to an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Use a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances with Auto Scaling to process the updates in the SQS queue. Store the processed updates in an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams ensures ordered processing of records within a shard while scaling to handle massive traffic spikes. Combining Kinesis with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB creates a fully serverless workflow, which minimizes operational and management overhead. Other alternatives fail because they either introduce high management overhead via Amazon EC2 instances or do not preserve strict message ordering.