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Geospatial Searching

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Geospatial searching is a powerful feature of the Amazon CloudSearch engine that enables users to search for and retrieve information based on geographic coordinates. The service supports two types of geospatial queries: distance-based queries and bounding box searches. Distance-based queries retur…

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Geospatial Searching Example Questions

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Question 1

A local food delivery service is using AWS. They want to implement a geospatial searching feature in their application using Amazon Elasticsearch. The service currently has a stream of messages containing the coordinates of delivery locations in Amazon Kinesis. What is the best solution for the delivery service to ingest data into Amazon Elasticsearch?

Correct Answer: Use Amazon Elasticsearch Service with Kinesis Data Firehose

The best solution for the delivery service is to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service with Kinesis Data Firehose. Kinesis Data Firehose directly integrates with Amazon Elasticsearch and automatically provisions the required resources for ingesting data. The other options do not provide direct integration or optimized performance.

Question 2

An AWS-based real estate app stores property records in Amazon DynamoDB. Users must search for listings within a specified radius of a latitude/longitude with low latency at scale. What is the most efficient approach to support these geospatial queries while keeping DynamoDB as the system of record?

Correct Answer: Use Amazon OpenSearch Service to index the properties (with a geo_point field) and perform geo-distance queries; keep the index in sync from DynamoDB via DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda.

Amazon OpenSearch Service provides purpose-built geospatial indexing and query capabilities (such as geo_point and geo_distance) that enable low-latency, accurate radius-based searches and sorting by distance at scale. DynamoDB is not optimized for geospatial queries; implementing them in application code typically requires scans and runtime calculations (e.g., Haversine), which is inefficient and does not scale. Messaging or delivery services like Amazon SQS or Kinesis Data Firehose do not provide query functionality. The recommended pattern is to use DynamoDB as the system of record and stream updates to OpenSearch (for example, via DynamoDB Streams with Lambda) to maintain a near-real-time geospatial index used by the search API.

Question 3

An application uses AWS to access climate data, including temperature, precipitation, and wind speed based on geographic coordinates. The data is updated hourly and stored in Amazon S3. What AWS service should be used to perform geospatial queries on this dataset?

Correct Answer: Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It is suitable for this scenario as it can process large datasets at a fast speed and does not require any preloading to a database. The other options do not provide the same ease and efficiency.

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