AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 333

A financial services company receives a regular data feed from its credit card servicing partner. Approximately 5,000 records are sent every 15 minutes in plaintext, delivered over HTTPS directly into an Amazon S3 bucket with server-side encryption. This feed contains sensitive credit card primary account number
(PAN) data. The company needs to automatically mask the PAN before sending the data to another S3 bucket for additional internal processing. The company also needs to remove and merge specific fields, and then transform the record into JSON format. Additionally, extra feeds are likely to be added in the future, so any design needs to be easily expandable.
Which solutions will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Trigger an AWS Lambda function on file delivery that extracts each record and writes it to an Amazon SQS queue. Trigger another Lambda function when new messages arrive in the SQS queue to process the records, writing the results to a temporary location in Amazon S3. Trigger a final Lambda function once the SQS queue is empty to transform the records into JSON format and send the results to another S3 bucket for internal processing.
• B. Trigger an AWS Lambda function on file delivery that extracts each record and writes it to an Amazon SQS queue. Configure an AWS Fargate container application to automatically scale to a single instance when the SQS queue contains messages. Have the application process each record, and transform the record into JSON format. When the queue is empty, send the results to another S3 bucket for internal processing and scale down the AWS Fargate instance.
• C. Create an AWS Glue crawler and custom classifier based on the data feed formats and build a table definition to match. Trigger an AWS Lambda function on file delivery to start an AWS Glue ETL job to transform the entire record according to the processing and transformation requirements. Define the output format as JSON. Once complete, have the ETL job send the results to another S3 bucket for internal processing.
• D. Create an AWS Glue crawler and custom classifier based upon the data feed formats and build a table definition to match. Perform an Amazon Athena query on file delivery to start an Amazon EMR ETL job to transform the entire record according to the processing and transformation requirements. Define the output format as JSON. Once complete, send the results to another S3 bucket for internal processing and scale down the EMR cluster.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

AWS Glue is a fully managed serverless ETL service designed precisely for schema discovery, data transformation, and formatting tasks, making it highly scalable for future feeds. An AWS Glue crawler can define the schema, and an AWS Glue ETL job triggered by Lambda on file upload can easily mask PAN data and output the result in JSON format. Options A and B introduce unnecessary orchestration complexity with SQS queues and container scaling, while Option D is incorrect because Amazon Athena queries cannot natively trigger Amazon EMR ETL jobs.