AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 284

A company has an application that collects notifications from thousands of alarm systems. The notifications include alarm notifications and information notifications. The information notifications include the system arming processes, disarming processes, and sensor status.

All notifications are kept as messages in an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue. Amazon EC2 instances that are in an Auto Scaling group process the messages. A SysOps administrator needs to implement a solution that prioritizes alarm notifications over information notifications.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Adjust the Auto Scaling group to scale faster when a high number of messages is in the queue.
• B. Use the Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) fanout feature with Amazon SQS to send the notifications in parallel to all the C2 instances
• C. Add an Amazon DynamoDB stream to accelerate the message processing
• D. Create a queue for alarm notifications and a queue for information notifications. Update the application to collect messages from the alarm notifications queue first.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Implementing multiple queues is a standard architectural pattern in Amazon SQS to handle message prioritization. By separating high-priority alarm notifications from lower-priority informational notifications into distinct queues, the consumer EC2 instances can be programmed to poll the alarm queue first. Other options, such as adjusting Auto Scaling (Option A), using SNS fanout (Option B), or adding DynamoDB streams (Option C), do not provide a mechanism to prioritize one message type over another during processing.