Question

Difficulty: HardIdentify design principles of the AWS Cloud

A SaaS company is designing a real-time telemetry processing platform for autonomous utility grids. The platform must process streams of incoming sensor data, validate the data payloads, and store the validated data for downstream analytics. The engineering team wants to implement an architecture that adheres to the AWS design principles of 'loose coupling' and 'services, not servers' to minimize operational maintenance and prevent data loss during traffic spikes.

Which TWO architectural decisions should the team implement to align with these design principles? (Select TWO.)

  1. Ingest and queue the data streams using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues between the ingestion and processing layers.Answer
  2. Deploy a serverless data processing pipeline using AWS Lambda functions that write results directly to Amazon DynamoDB.Answer
  3. C
    Run a unified monolithic application on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances to handle ingestion, validation, and storage in a single deployment package.
  4. D
    Configure the processing application components to communicate via direct, hardcoded IP addresses to minimize latency between systems.
  5. E
    Manually adjust the instance type of a single Amazon EC2 application server to a larger size whenever incoming telemetry traffic increases.

Answer

Ingest and queue the data streams using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues between the ingestion and processing layers, and deploy a serverless data processing pipeline using AWS Lambda functions that write results directly to Amazon DynamoDB.
The correct architecture uses Amazon SQS to queue messages, which ensures that the ingestion and processing components are loosely coupled and can scale or fail independently without losing data. Additionally, using AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB leverages the 'services, not servers' principle, allowing the company to build and run applications without the operational burden of provisioning and managing virtual servers.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirements for 'loose coupling' to find a solution that reduces interdependencies between components.
Amazon SQS acts as a message broker that decouples layers, allowing the processing layer to consume messages at its own pace without affecting the ingestion layer.
This isolates layers, satisfying the loose coupling principle.
2
Analyze the requirements for 'services, not servers' to find solutions that offload system administration.
AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB are fully managed, serverless services that do not require provisioning, configuring, or managing virtual servers.
This satisfies the services, not servers principle by offloading operational overhead to AWS.
3
Evaluate the distractors against these principles to confirm why they are incorrect.
Monolithic architectures, hardcoded IP addresses, and manual vertical scaling of EC2 instances introduce tight coupling and significant administrative overhead.
These options are anti-patterns that contradict the target AWS design principles.

Key Concept

AWS Cloud design principles focus on loose coupling (reducing interdependencies between components) and services, not servers (using managed/serverless offerings to minimize operational overhead).
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