DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company is building a data lake on Amazon S3 and wants to ingest data from multiple AWS services (CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and ALB logs). The data should be stored in a central S3 bucket with a common partitioning scheme. Which service can be used to collect and centralize this data with minimal configuration?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates often overcomplicate the solution by choosing a data pipeline or ETL service (like Data Pipeline or Glue) when the simplest and most efficient method is to configure each source service to write directly to the central S3 bucket, leveraging native AWS integrations.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Configure each source service to deliver logs directly to the central S3 bucket.
CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and ALB logs can each be configured to deliver logs directly to a specified S3 bucket, including a central bucket, with no intermediary service required. This approach minimizes configuration overhead and avoids data movement costs, as each service writes natively to S3 using its own built-in delivery mechanism.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use AWS Data Pipeline to copy logs from each source S3 bucket to the central bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Data Pipeline adds complexity but could work, though not minimal configuration.
- ✗
Use AWS Glue to crawl the logs from each source and write to a central S3 bucket.
Why it's wrong here
Glue crawls metadata, not data.
- ✗
Set up Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to ingest logs from each service and write to S3.
Why it's wrong here
Firehose cannot directly ingest logs from these services; they need custom integration.
- ✓
Configure each source service to deliver logs directly to the central S3 bucket.
Why this is correct
CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and ALB can all deliver to S3 directly.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DEA-C01 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DEA-C01 exam.