Question

Difficulty: EasyDecoupling Architectures and Event-Driven Messaging

An online learning platform uses a web application to manage student course enrollments. The system must decouple the front-end enrollment portal from the back-end database processing service. To ensure fair registration for courses with limited capacity, enrollment requests must be processed in the exact sequence they are submitted. Which messaging service configuration should a solutions architect recommend to decouple these components while maintaining the correct message sequence?

  1. An Amazon SQS FIFO queueAnswer
  2. B
    An Amazon SQS Standard queue
  3. C
    An Amazon RDS DB instance with a read replica
  4. D
    An Amazon DynamoDB table in provisioned capacity mode

Answer

An Amazon SQS FIFO queue
An Amazon SQS FIFO queue is the correct solution because it successfully decouples the application tiers and guarantees that messages are processed in the exact order they are sent, satisfying the requirement for sequential enrollment processing.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirement for decoupling the web portal and the database service.
Identify that a message queue or event bus is needed to decouple the frontend from the backend.
Decoupling ensures the front-end application remains responsive even if the back-end database has processing delays.
2
Evaluate the ordering constraint for the enrollment requests.
Identify that the solution must guarantee first-in, first-out (FIFO) processing to ensure fair registration.
Standard message queues do not guarantee strict message ordering.
3
Select the AWS service that provides both decoupling and strict ordering.
Determine that Amazon SQS FIFO (First-In-First-Out) queues meet both criteria.
SQS FIFO queues guarantee that the order in which messages are sent and received is strictly preserved.

Key Concept

Using Amazon SQS FIFO queues to decouple application components while maintaining message ordering.
Estimated Time:45s
Rate this question