GregLab | Exam Prep

Application Integration

Core

Amazon SQS

Durable message queues for decoupled pipeline workers.

Key points

  • SQS durably buffers messages so pipeline stages can scale, retry, and recover independently.
  • Consumers must handle delivery semantics, visibility, retries, and failed-message isolation.

Best-known use cases

  • Buffer ingestion jobs when downstream processors cannot keep pace.
  • Decouple pipeline stages so workers can retry and scale independently.

What candidates often confuse it with

  • SQS is a worker queue; SNS is publish-subscribe notification and EventBridge routes matching events.

Key takeaway

Choose SQS when downstream workers need durable buffering and independent processing.

Relevant exam tasks

  • D1.3 — Task 1.3: Orchestrate data pipelines
  • 1.3.4 — Use notification services to send alerts (for example, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS).

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Free AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate prep

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Practice with exam-style multiple-choice and multiple-response questions, score breakdowns, explanations, and a compact reference for this lane's official exam domains.

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Exam Weights

Exam snapshot

DEA-C01 at a glance

Category
Associate
Duration
130 minutes
Questions
65 total; 50 scored and 15 unidentified unscored
Formats
Multiple choice and multiple response
Scoring
100–1,000 scaled score; 720 minimum passing score

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Exam fidelity: AWS documents 65 questions in 130 minutes: 50 scored and 15 unidentified unscored, using multiple-choice and multiple-response formats. This site's practice accuracy and readiness do not reproduce AWS's 100–1,000 scaled scoring or identify unscored items. Difficulty labels describe this site's Associate-level scenario complexity, not an AWS-published question rating.

Reference

DEA-C01 topics and reference map

Study links

DEA-C01 resources