DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company is designing a data ingestion pipeline for clickstream data from a website. The data must be ingested in near real-time. Which TWO services can be used together to build this pipeline?
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
✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (A) is correct because it is designed for real-time streaming ingestion of high-volume data such as clickstream events, allowing producers to continuously write records that can be processed within milliseconds by consumers. Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose (D) is correct because it can consume streaming data and reliably load it into destinations like S3, Redshift, or Elasticsearch in near real-time, making it a natural complement to Kinesis Data Streams for building an end-to-end ingestion pipeline. Together, Kinesis Data Streams captures and buffers the clickstream events while Firehose delivers them to downstream storage or analytics services with minimal latency. Amazon SQS (B) is a message queue for decoupling applications but is not purpose-built for real-time streaming analytics pipelines. Amazon S3 (C) is a storage service, not an ingestion mechanism, and Amazon DynamoDB (E) is a NoSQL database, so neither serves as the streaming ingestion component required here.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why this is correct
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams ingests clickstream events in near real time with low latency and durable retention. Paired with a consumer such as AWS Lambda or Kinesis Data Analytics, it forms the ingestion layer of a real-time pipeline, meeting the near-real-time requirement.
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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a queue, not a streaming service: it lacks the durable, replayable, ordered log with consumer shards that near real-time clickstream pipelines need. It is tempting because SQS decouples producers from consumers and buffers bursts, which suits task distribution between microservices rather than continuous analytics ingestion.
- ✗
Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Amazon S3 is object storage for durable batch landing, not a near real-time streaming transport; it cannot alone satisfy the ingestion requirement. It is tempting because S3 commonly serves as the pipeline's final destination, and would be correct for storing processed clickstream output or archival data after streaming ingestion.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Why this is correct
Kinesis Data Firehose delivers streaming data to destinations such as S3, Redshift, or Splunk with near real-time buffering. Paired with a producer like Kinesis Data Streams or the agent, it satisfies the near real-time ingestion constraint without custom consumers.
- ✗
Amazon DynamoDB
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is a key-value store for transactional lookups, not a stream ingestion buffer; it cannot decouple producers from consumers or replay clickstream events. It is tempting because DynamoDB Streams can trigger Lambda on item changes, which suits capturing changes to an existing table rather than ingesting raw website traffic.
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 |
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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.