AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Application Integration, Analytics & Operational Excellence Syllabus

Application Integration, Analytics & Operational Excellence syllabus — full chapter and topic list

Expand any chapter to see its topics and sub-topics. This is the whole examinable outline for Application Integration, Analytics & Operational Excellence in AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, not a summary of it.

1. 1

   Decoupling & Messaging

   5 topics

   • Amazon SQS
     • Standard vs FIFO queues
     • Visibility timeout, dead-letter queues and long polling
   • Amazon SNS pub/sub and fan-out patterns
   • Amazon EventBridge and event-driven architectures
   • AWS Step Functions for workflow orchestration
   • Amazon MQ and Amazon AppFlow overview
2. 2

   Streaming & Analytics

   4 topics

   • Amazon Kinesis
     • Data Streams, Data Firehose and Managed Service for Apache Flink
   • Amazon Athena and AWS Glue
   • Amazon Redshift data warehousing
     • Redshift Spectrum and concurrency scaling
   • Amazon EMR, QuickSight and OpenSearch Service
3. 3

   Monitoring & Observability

   4 topics

   • Amazon CloudWatch
     • Metrics, alarms and composite alarms
     • Logs, Logs Insights and the CloudWatch agent
     • Dashboards and EventBridge scheduling
   • AWS CloudTrail and AWS X-Ray tracing
   • AWS Systems Manager
     • Session Manager, Patch Manager and Run Command
   • AWS Health Dashboard and Trusted Advisor checks
4. 4

   Resilience & Disaster Recovery

   4 topics

   • RTO and RPO concepts
   • Disaster recovery strategies
     • Backup and restore
     • Pilot light and warm standby
     • Multi-site active-active
   • Designing highly available and fault-tolerant architectures
   • AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars and cost optimization

Application Integration, Analytics & Operational Excellence flashcards for AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

21 of 51 cards from the Application Integration, Analytics & Operational Excellence deck — real questions with worked answers.

1. What are the two types of Amazon SQS queues, and what does each guarantee?

   Standard queues offer nearly unlimited throughput, at-least-once delivery, and best-effort ordering. FIFO queues guarantee exactly-once processing and strict first-in-first-out ordering, with up to 300 messages/sec (3,000 with batching).

2. What is the default and maximum visibility timeout for an Amazon SQS message?

   The default visibility timeout is 30 seconds, and the maximum is 12 hours. During this period, a consumed message is hidden from other consumers.

3. In Amazon SQS, what is the difference between short polling and long polling?

   Short polling returns immediately, sampling only a subset of servers (may return empty even if messages exist). Long polling (WaitTimeSeconds up to 20s) waits for messages to arrive, reducing empty responses and cost.

4. What is the maximum message retention period for an Amazon SQS queue?

   Messages can be retained from 60 seconds up to 14 days; the default retention is 4 days.

5. What is an SQS Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ) used for?

   A DLQ stores messages that fail processing after exceeding the maxReceiveCount (redrive policy). It isolates problematic messages for debugging and prevents them from blocking the main queue.

6. What is the maximum size of a single Amazon SQS message, and how do you send larger payloads?

   The max message size is 256 KB. For larger payloads, use the SQS Extended Client Library to store the body in Amazon S3 and pass a reference in the message.

7. What is the Amazon SNS fan-out pattern?

   A single message published to an SNS topic is delivered (fanned out) to multiple subscribers simultaneously — commonly multiple SQS queues, Lambda functions, or HTTP endpoints — enabling parallel, decoupled processing.

8. Which delivery protocols/endpoints can subscribe to an Amazon SNS topic?

   SQS, AWS Lambda, HTTP/HTTPS, email, email-JSON, SMS, mobile push (application), and Kinesis Data Firehose.

9. What is the difference between SNS Standard and FIFO topics?

   Standard topics give high throughput with best-effort ordering and at-least-once delivery. FIFO topics guarantee strict ordering and deduplication but can only deliver to SQS FIFO queues and have lower throughput.

10. How does Amazon SNS message filtering work?

    Subscribers apply a filter policy (JSON) against message attributes or message body. Only messages matching the policy are delivered to that subscription, avoiding the need for separate topics.

11. What is Amazon EventBridge, and how does it relate to CloudWatch Events?

    EventBridge is a serverless event bus for routing events from AWS services, SaaS apps, and custom apps to targets using rules. It is the evolution of CloudWatch Events, adding the schema registry and third-party SaaS partner event sources.

12. What is the EventBridge Schema Registry?

    It stores event structure (schemas), can auto-discover schemas from events on a bus, and generates code bindings so developers can work with strongly typed event objects.

13. How do EventBridge rules route events, and what is a target?

    Rules match incoming events against an event pattern (or run on a schedule). Matching events are sent to one or more targets (up to 5 per rule), such as Lambda, SQS, SNS, Step Functions, or Kinesis.

14. What is the main benefit of an event-driven architecture on AWS?

    Loose coupling: producers and consumers are decoupled, enabling independent scaling, asynchronous processing, resilience to failures, and easier addition of new consumers without changing producers.

15. What are the two workflow types in AWS Step Functions and when is each used?

    Standard workflows: long-running (up to 1 year), exactly-once, full execution history — for orchestration/auditable workflows. Express workflows: high-volume, short-duration (up to 5 min), at-least-once — for streaming/event processing.

16. In AWS Step Functions, what language defines a state machine, and what are common state types?

    Amazon States Language (ASL), a JSON-based language. Common states: Task, Choice, Parallel, Map, Wait, Pass, Succeed, and Fail.

17. What does the Map state do in AWS Step Functions?

    It iterates over a collection of items and runs a set of steps for each item, supporting parallel processing (with concurrency control) — useful for fan-out over arrays of data.

18. What is Amazon MQ, and when should you choose it over SQS/SNS?

    Amazon MQ is a managed message broker for Apache ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ. Choose it when migrating existing applications that use standard protocols (JMS, AMQP, MQTT, STOMP, OpenWire) rather than rewriting to SQS/SNS APIs.

19. What is Amazon AppFlow used for?

    AppFlow is a fully managed integration service for securely transferring data between SaaS apps (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, etc.) and AWS services (S3, Redshift) without writing custom code, with built-in data transformation.

20. What are the four core services in the Amazon Kinesis family?

    Kinesis Data Streams (real-time ingestion), Kinesis Data Firehose (load to destinations like S3/Redshift), Kinesis Data Analytics (SQL/Flink on streams), and Kinesis Video Streams (video ingestion).

21. In Kinesis Data Streams, what is a shard and what is its throughput limit?

    A shard is a unit of capacity. Each shard ingests up to 1 MB/sec or 1,000 records/sec, and outputs up to 2 MB/sec. Throughput scales by adding shards.

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