AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesEasy
A media company is building a new video processing pipeline on AWS. The pipeline needs to handle highly variable workloads, sometimes processing thousands of videos simultaneously and at other times being nearly idle. The solution must be cost-effective and automatically adjust capacity based on demand. Which AWS service is best suited to manage the compute resources for this fluctuating workload?
- AAWS Lambda
- BAmazon EC2 Spot Instances
- CAmazon EC2 Reserved Instances
- DAmazon EC2 On-Demand Instances
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that automatically scales with demand, executing code only when triggered. This makes it highly cost-effective for variable, event-driven workloads as you only pay for the compute time consumed.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. EC2 Spot Instances are for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads that can tolerate interruptions, not ideal for guaranteed processing in a pipeline.
- C. EC2 Reserved Instances are for predictable, long-term workloads, not highly variable ones.
- D. EC2 On-Demand provides flexibility but doesn't automatically scale down to zero and can be expensive for idle periods.
AWS Lambda
A serverless compute service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources. You only pay for the compute time consumed.
- Serverless: no servers to provision or manage.
- Event-driven: executes code only when triggered.
- Automatic scaling: scales from zero to thousands of requests per second.
- Cost-effective: pay only for actual compute duration.
Memory trick: Lambda: Code on demand, scales like a band.