AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 966

A company uses GPS trackers to document the migration patterns of thousands of sea turtles. The trackers check every 5 minutes to see if a turtle has moved more than 100 yards (91.4 meters). If a turtle has moved, its tracker sends the new coordinates to a web application running on three Amazon EC2 instances that are in multiple Availability Zones in one AWS Region.

Recently, the web application was overwhelmed while processing an unexpected volume of tracker data. Data was lost with no way to replay the events. A solutions architect must prevent this problem from happening again and needs a solution with the least operational overhead.

What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the data. Configure the application to scan for new data in the bucket for processing.
• B. Create an Amazon API Gateway endpoint to handle transmitted location coordinates. Use an AWS Lambda function to process each item concurrently.
• C. Create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue to store the incoming data. Configure the application to poll for new messages for processing.
• D. Create an Amazon DynamoDB table to store transmitted location coordinates. Configure the application to query the table for new data for processing. Use TTL to remove data that has been processed.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon SQS provides a highly reliable, fully managed message queue that decouples the ingestion of tracker data from the processing application, preventing data loss during unexpected traffic spikes. By buffering the incoming messages, the Amazon EC2 instances can poll and process the data at their own pace. Other options like Amazon S3 or Amazon DynamoDB are not designed for message queuing and would require complex, inefficient polling mechanisms.