AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – ProfessionalIncident and Event ResponseEasy

A media company uses Amazon S3 to store large volumes of user-uploaded video content. They need to implement an automated workflow to process these videos (e.g., transcoding, thumbnail generation) as soon as they are uploaded to a specific S3 bucket. The processing should be serverless and scale automatically with the upload volume. Which AWS service combination is most appropriate for initiating this event-driven workflow?

  1. AAmazon SQS and Amazon ECS
  2. BAmazon S3 Event Notifications and AWS Lambda
  3. CAWS Data Pipeline and Amazon Kinesis
  4. DAWS Step Functions and Amazon EC2
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B. Amazon S3 Event Notifications and AWS Lambda

Amazon S3 Event Notifications can be configured to trigger an AWS Lambda function whenever a new object is created in a specified S3 bucket. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that can execute the video processing logic (transcoding, thumbnail generation) and scale automatically based on the incoming event volume, making this a highly efficient and scalable solution.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. Amazon SQS is a message queue; while it could be part of a larger workflow, S3 Event Notifications directly trigger Lambda without an intermediate queue for this specific use case. Amazon ECS requires managing containers, which is less 'serverless' than Lambda.
  • C. AWS Data Pipeline is for scheduled data movement and transformation, not real-time event-driven processing. Amazon Kinesis is for streaming data, which is less direct for S3 object-creation events.
  • D. AWS Step Functions orchestrates workflows, but needs an event source. Amazon EC2 is not serverless and would require managing servers for processing.

S3 Event-Driven Processing with Lambda

This pattern leverages Amazon S3 Event Notifications to trigger AWS Lambda functions in response to S3 object-level events, enabling serverless and scalable processing workflows.

  • S3 events (e.g., object creation) trigger Lambda.
  • Lambda performs custom processing (e.g., transcoding, indexing).
  • Provides a highly scalable and cost-effective serverless architecture.

Memory trick: Upload to S3, Lambda gets the call to transform for you and me.

More Incident and Event Response questions