AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesEasy

A global SaaS company is building a new microservices platform on AWS. They need a highly scalable and resilient messaging service to enable asynchronous communication between their services. The service must support fan-out messaging to multiple subscribers and guaranteed message delivery, even during outages of individual services. Which AWS service meets these requirements?

  1. AAmazon SNS
  2. BAmazon SQS Standard
  3. CAWS Step Functions
  4. DAmazon Kinesis Data Streams
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: A. Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS is a highly available, durable, secure, and fully managed pub/sub messaging service. It allows you to fan out messages to a large number of subscribers, including SQS queues, Lambda functions, HTTP/S endpoints, and email, meeting the requirement for fan-out and guaranteed message delivery.

Why the other options are wrong

  • B. Amazon SQS Standard is a message queuing service primarily for point-to-point communication or simple fan-out with multiple queues, but SNS is specifically designed for fan-out to various types of subscribers.
  • C. AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service for coordinating distributed applications, not a messaging service for direct asynchronous communication between services.
  • D. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time processing of large streams of data, not primarily for asynchronous fan-out messaging between microservices.

Amazon SNS

A highly available, durable, secure, and fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to send messages to a large number of subscribers.

  • Supports fan-out messaging.
  • Integrates with various AWS services and endpoints.
  • Guaranteed message delivery.

Memory trick: SNS spreads the word, many ears have heard, reliable and quick, no message deferred.

More Design Resilient Architectures questions