FirstTry

Objective 2.1

SAA-C03

Design scalable and loosely coupled architectures.

Objective 2.1 sits in Design Resilient Architectures, which carries 26% of the Solutions Architect Associate exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Amazon Web Services (AWS) page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Amazon Web Services (AWS) exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

2-1Design Resilient Architectures

An order event must reach three teams' services, each consuming at its own pace and none missing events while it is down. What do you build?

One SQS queue that all three services pollOne queue hands a message to one reader. The three services would race, and each event would be handled once between them rather than three times.
An SNS topic with an SQS queue per serviceCorrect · your answerCorrect. Every service owns a buffer that fills whether or not the service is running.
An SNS topic with three HTTPS subscriptionsAn endpoint that is down misses deliveries once the retry policy runs out, and nothing holds the event for it.
Three Lambda functions on a single queueSeveral functions on one queue split the work rather than repeat it. That is the shape you pick for throughput.

Correct.

Checked against docs.aws.amazon.com, August 2026

Concept

Two consumers that must both see the same event cannot share one delivery. A publish channel copies an event to every subscriber, and a buffer in front of each consumer is what lets a slow or absent one catch up.

Why B

Publishing once and letting the topic copy the event into a queue for each team gives parallel processing plus a durable landing spot, so a team that is offline finds its work waiting when it returns.

Source

The Fanout scenario is when a message published to an SNS topic is replicated and pushed to multiple endpoints, such as Firehose delivery streams, Amazon SQS queues, HTTP(S) endpoints, and Lambda functions. This allows for parallel asynchronous processing. For example, you can develop an application that publishes a message to an SNS topic whenever an order is placed for a product. Then, SQS queues that are subscribed to the SNS topic receive identical notifications for the new order…

AWS docs: What is Amazon SNS, checked August 2026
#sns#sqs#fanout#decoupling

Now you: objective 2.1 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

2-1Design Resilient Architectures

Jobs take up to eight minutes, and your team sees each message handled by several workers at once. The queue is at defaults. What do you change?

Sample question 2 of 3

2-1Design Resilient Architectures

A worker sometimes needs 20 hours per message, and the team extends visibility with a heartbeat. Messages still reappear and are processed twice. What now?

Sample question 3 of 3

2-1Design Resilient Architectures

Payment instructions must be applied once each and in the order the user sent them. Which messaging choice promises that?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Design Resilient Architectures