Night 28 — Integration services (EventBridge vs SQS vs Kinesis vs Step Functions)

~2 hr. $0 AWS spend — read-only audit of Nights 12–14 study resources + decision-tree drills. No new deploy tonight — synthesizes Week 2 integration labs before Night 32 Step Functions capstone.

Plain language first

What are “integration services”?

They move signals and work between parts of your system without hard-wiring every caller to every callee.

Analogy: A ski resort lift ticket scanner (producer) should not call every cafeteria, rental shop, and patrol radio directly when a guest checks in. You need:

Tonight you learn which bell to ring — not deploy a new stack.

Master decision tree (memorize)

What are you trying to do?
│
├─ Run on a schedule OR route AWS service events?
│     → EventBridge (rule or Scheduler)
│     GSA: monthly Iceland cron (Night 12)
│
├─ Buffer work — producer faster than consumer, pull model?
│     → SQS standard (or FIFO if strict order + dedup)
│     GSA: completion queue (Night 13)
│
├─ Notify many subscribers — push, fan-out?
│     → SNS (+ SQS per team for durable fan-out)
│     GSA: failure alerts topic (Night 14)
│
├─ High-volume streaming data — replay, custom consumers?
│     → Kinesis Data Streams (or MSK for Kafka)
│
├─ Stream to S3/Redshift/OpenSearch — minimal consumer code?
│     → Kinesis Data Firehose
│
├─ Multi-step workflow — retries, Catch, human approval, visual state?
│     → Step Functions Standard (Express for high-volume short flows)
│     GSA: Night 32 capstone
│
└─ GraphQL API + real-time mobile subscriptions?
      → AppSync (awareness — not in GSA deploy)

Block 1 (~50 min) — Comparison tables + GSA map

Read gsa-integration-map.md

Trace the Iceland pipeline from EventBridge schedule through SQS success path and SNS failure path. Label every resource name on paper.

EventBridge vs SQS vs SNS (exam core)

Classic combos (all in GSA study stack):

1. EventBridge schedule → ECS RunTask (Night 12)
2. EventBridge pattern → SQS → Lambda (Night 13)
3. EventBridge pattern → SNS → SQS inbox (Night 14 fan-out)
4. CloudWatch alarm → SNS (Night 12 FailedInvocations)

EventBridge traps (review from Nights 12–14)

Kinesis family (new for Week 4 synthesis)

Streams vs Firehose — one line each:

• Streams: “I need shard-level control, multiple custom consumers, replay from retention.”
• Firehose: “Land streaming records in S3 for Athena — AWS scales and batches for me.”

GSA tie-in: Night 24 Athena queries batch S3/Iceberg — Firehose would be the streaming ingress if live edit events needed a lake path. Iceland monthly batch uses ECS + S3, not Kinesis.

Step Functions (preview Night 32)

When Step Functions beats EventBridge + SQS alone:

• Ordered multi-step with different retry policies per step
• Catch states routing failures to SNS vs DLQ vs alternate path
• Wait for external callback (human approve, task STOPPED)
• Visual workflow operators must see state in console

When EventBridge + SQS is enough (GSA today):

• Schedule fires one task
• Success/failure events route to queue or topic
• No cross-step compensation logic in one state machine

AppSync (awareness)

AppSync resolves fields from DynamoDB, Lambda, HTTP, OpenSearch — exam may pair it with mobile apps needing live lift status, not batch ETL.

Integration vs analytics placement

                    INTEGRATION (Tonight)              ANALYTICS (Nights 24–25)
                    ─────────────────────              ─────────────────────────
Purpose             Decouple + route + orchestrate     Query + aggregate at rest
Examples            EventBridge, SQS, SNS, SFN         Athena, Glue, Kinesis→S3
GSA                 Iceland notify path                Iceberg resort counts SQL
Latency             Seconds to minutes                 Seconds to hours (batch)

Block 2 (~40 min) — Lab: read-only integration audit

Prerequisites

Spend note: $0 — describe/list only; no creates.

What the lab does

Production safety: Read-only — does not modify EventBridge, SQS, SNS, ECS, or Iceland task definitions.

Run the lab

# PowerShell — from repo root
.\HTML\study-lab\night-28-lab-integration-audit.ps1
.\HTML\study-lab\night-28-lab-integration-audit.ps1 -PrintDecisionTree

# Git Bash / WSL
bash HTML/study-lab/night-28-lab-integration-audit.sh
bash HTML/study-lab/night-28-lab-integration-audit.sh --print-decision-tree

End-to-end validation

1. Result file: night-28-integration-result.json — each resource found: true/false.

2. Expected found (if Nights 12–14 still up):

   • Rule saa-study-gsa-iceland-monthly
   • Rule saa-study-gsa-iceland-success-to-sqs
   • Rule saa-study-gsa-iceland-failure-to-sns
   • Queue saa-study-gsa-iceland-completion + DLQ
   • Topic saa-study-gsa-iceland-alerts

3. Worksheet (5 min on paper): For each missing resource, write which Night lab recreates it.

4. Night 32 sketch: Draw Step Functions states connecting ECS → SQS → Lambda → SNS using gsa-integration-map.md capstone diagram.

Troubleshoot in this order:

1. All found: false? Wrong AWS account/Region — study stack is us-east-1.
2. Schedule rule missing but SQS exists? Re-run Night 12 setup script only.
3. FailedInvocations alarm missing? Night 12/14 — alarm is optional for audit pass.
4. Script errors on jq? PowerShell path uses native JSON — Bash needs aws only.

Draw exercise (10 min — exam artifact)

On one page, draw two flows without looking at notes:

Flow A — Success path: Schedule → ECS → (event) → ? → consumer
Flow B — Failure path: ECS exit 1 → ? → email + inbox queue

Label EventBridge, SQS, SNS on the correct arrows.

Reference files

• night-28-lab-integration-audit.ps1 / .sh — read-only audit
• night-28-integration-result.json — audit output
• gsa-integration-map.md — full GSA integration reference
• night-12-eventbridge-schedule.md, night-13-sqs-decoupling.md, night-14-sns-fanout.md — Week 2 deep dives

Block 3 (~30 min) — Quiz + console reading

File: night-28-quiz.json — 15 timed scenario questions (~24 min at 96 sec each).

Score on the study site: /aws-solutions-architect-study/quiz?night=28.

Console reading (5 min):

• EventBridge → Rules → open saa-study-gsa-iceland-monthly → Targets tab → note IAM role.
• SQS → saa-study-gsa-iceland-completion → Dead-letter queue + Access policy.
• SNS → saa-study-gsa-iceland-alerts → Subscriptions → note SQS protocol + PendingConfirmation on email.

Week 4 map (continued)

5 flashcards (write tonight)

1. EventBridge vs SQS — One-line when to pick each?
   (EventBridge: schedule/route AWS events to targets; SQS: durable pull buffer for workers.)

2. SNS vs SQS — Push or pull?
   (SNS push fan-out; SQS pull buffer — often SNS → multiple SQS queues.)

3. Kinesis Streams vs Firehose — Who writes the consumer?
   (Streams: you/custom Lambda; Firehose: AWS delivers to S3/Redshift/OpenSearch.)

4. FailedInvocations vs exit code 1 — What failed?
   (FailedInvocations: rule could not invoke target; exit 1: container ran and failed.)

5. Step Functions vs EventBridge+SQS — When upgrade to SFN?
   (Multi-step orchestration with per-step retry/Catch/Wait — Night 32 capstone.)

Night 29 preview

Week 4 review — Storage class decision tree (S3/EBS/EFS), integration + analytics synthesis, 30-question timed drill, architecture notes update before Week 5 cost labs.