A loan application passes through six steps — validate, credit check, risk score, human approval, notify, archive — with retries on failure and a different path when the credit check comes back negative. Today these are Lambda functions invoking each other, and when an application stalls nobody can say which step it stalled at. What should the team adopt?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services hard
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Correct AWS Step Functions
Correct. The workflow becomes a state machine defined outside the functions, with built-in retries and branching, the ability to wait for a human approval, and a visible execution history that shows exactly where any application is.
Not correct More Lambda functions, one per transition
Wrong. That is more of the same: the orchestration logic stays scattered through the code, which is the reason nobody can see the state of an application in the first place.
Not correct An Amazon SQS queue between each pair of steps
Wrong. Queues decouple two components very well, but they express no sequence and no branching, and the state of one application would be spread across six queues with nothing joining them up.
Not correct Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
Wrong. It starts things on a schedule. The problem here is order, failure handling and visibility, none of which is about timing.
Why
Sort the integration services by the question they answer. What happens next, and did it succeed? Step Functions. Who has to do this work? SQS. Who needs to know it happened? SNS. Which of many targets should this event be routed to? EventBridge. This task statement also covers the business applications you buy rather than build — Amazon Connect for a contact centre and Amazon SES for email — and their exam value is simply knowing what each one is for.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.8
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)
More questions on this objective
- A team builds the same stack — a load balancer, three EC2 instances and a database — by clicking through the console once for dev, once for test and once for production. The three environments have quietly drifted apart and a bug that only appears in production took a week to trace to a missing setting. They want the stack described once, reviewed in a pull request, and applied identically to each environment. Which service does that? machine-checked
- A Python reporting job runs unattended every night. Inside its own logic it needs to list objects in an S3 bucket, read a few of them, and write a summary object back, handling failures with the program's existing retry and logging code. What is the appropriate way for that program to call AWS? machine-checked
- A small team has a Java web application and no operations staff. They want to hand AWS the application package and have it provision the instances, the load balancer and the scaling policy, while keeping the ability to inspect and adjust those resources later if they need to. Which service fits? machine-checked
- A manufacturer keeps its plant-floor control application on servers inside the factory, because production must continue when the internet link drops. Its reporting and analytics run in AWS and read the same production data. Which TWO statements about this arrangement are accurate? machine-checked
- An internal application runs on a single EC2 instance in one Availability Zone. During a power event in that Availability Zone the application was unreachable for four hours. The team wants the cheapest change that keeps it serving through the same kind of event, without moving to another Region. What should they do? machine-checked
- A German insurer is told by its regulator that customer records must remain within the European Union. Four candidate Regions can all run every service the workload needs, and one of them is noticeably cheaper per instance-hour. Which consideration settles the choice of Region first? machine-checked