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6.2. Quick Reference: Decision Trees and Service Comparisons
Without clear decision frameworks, exam candidates waste time deliberating between services that differ on just one criterion. Think of these decision trees like a triage system — each question narrows the field quickly so you spend mental energy on the hard questions, not the straightforward ones.
Ingestion Service Selection
Transformation Service Selection
Data Store Selection
Orchestration Service Selection
| Scenario | Best Service |
|---|---|
| Simple Glue-only pipeline (jobs + crawlers) | Glue Workflows |
| Multi-service AWS pipeline with branching | Step Functions |
| Complex dependencies, external integrations, team knows Airflow | MWAA |
| Simple scheduled trigger (no dependencies) | EventBridge Scheduler |
Encryption Quick Reference
| Requirement | Solution |
|---|---|
| Default S3 encryption, no special needs | SSE-S3 |
| Audit every key usage in CloudTrail | SSE-KMS |
| Customer must control encryption keys | SSE-C or CSE |
| Cross-account encrypted data sharing | SSE-KMS + key policy grant |
| Prevent KMS throttling at high throughput | S3 Bucket Keys |
Security & Governance Quick Reference
| Need | Service |
|---|---|
| Fine-grained data lake access (column/row) | Lake Formation |
| API call auditing | CloudTrail |
| PII discovery in S3 | Amazon Macie |
| Credential rotation | Secrets Manager |
| Configuration compliance monitoring | AWS Config |
| Prevent actions in wrong Regions | SCP (Service Control Policy) |
| Business data catalog and governance | SageMaker Catalog |
| Tag-based access at scale | ABAC / LF-Tags |
Written byAlvin Varughese
Founder•15 professional certifications