AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 320

A company has a media catalog with metadata for each item in the catalog. Different types of metadata are extracted from the media items by an application running on AWS Lambda. Metadata is extracted according to a number of rules with the output stored in an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster. The extraction process is done in batches and takes around 40 minutes to complete.
The update process is triggered manually whenever the metadata extraction rules change.
The company wants to reduce the amount of time it takes to extract metadata from its media catalog. To achieve this, a solutions architect has split the single metadata extraction Lambda function into a Lambda function for each type of metadata.
Which additional steps should the solutions architect take to meet the requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an AWS Step Functions workflow to run the Lambda functions in parallel. Create another Step Functions workflow that retrieves a list of media items and executes a metadata extraction workflow for each one.
• B. Create an AWS Batch compute environment for each Lambda function. Configure an AWS Batch job queue for the compute environment. Create a Lambda function to retrieve a list of media items and write each item to the job queue.
• C. Create an AWS Step Functions workflow to run the Lambda functions in parallel. Create a Lambda function to retrieve a list of media items and write each item to an Amazon SQS queue. Configure the SQS queue as an input to the Step Functions workflow.
• D. Create a Lambda function to retrieve a list of media items and write each item to an Amazon SQS queue. Subscribe the metadata extraction Lambda functions to the SQS queue with a large batch size.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the correct choice because AWS Step Functions can orchestrate complex workflows, utilizing the Map state to run the split Lambda functions in parallel for each media item, which drastically reduces execution time. Option B is incorrect because migrating Lambda functions to AWS Batch adds unnecessary operational complexity. Options C and D are incorrect because SQS does not natively trigger Step Functions directly to coordinate parallel runs, and having multiple distinct Lambda functions compete for the same SQS messages would not orchestrate the parallel extraction of different metadata types per item correctly.