DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company needs to ingest real-time clickstream data from a web application into Amazon S3 for analytics. The data must be available within minutes of generation. Which AWS service should be used to capture and deliver this streaming data?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Amazon Kinesis Data Streams (which requires custom consumers and is not directly integrated with S3) with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose (which is purpose-built for automated delivery to destinations like S3), leading candidates to overlook the 'within minutes' requirement and choose a service that needs additional components.
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 Firehose
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the correct choice because it is a fully managed service designed to capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon S3, Redshift, Elasticsearch, or Splunk in near real-time (typically within 60 seconds). It directly addresses the requirement for ingesting real-time clickstream data and delivering it to S3 within minutes, without requiring custom code or manual scaling.
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 RDS
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS is a managed relational database for transactional workloads, not a streaming ingestion pipeline delivering clickstream events into Amazon S3. It suits storing structured application records queried with SQL, not capturing and landing continuous web event streams within minutes.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Why this is correct
Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed delivery stream that ingests streaming records and buffers them to S3 on a configurable interval, achieving near-real-time availability within minutes without consumer code. It matches the minutes-latency requirement for clickstream ingestion.
- ✗
AWS Glue
Why it's wrong here
AWS Glue is a serverless ETL service for batch-oriented data transformation and cataloguing, not a real-time ingestion engine; it cannot capture streaming clickstream data and deliver it to S3 within minutes. The correct service, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, directly buffers and writes streaming records to S3 with near-real-time latency. Glue is tempting because it can process data from streaming sources via Glue Streaming ETL jobs, but those jobs require an upstream stream consumer like Kinesis Data Streams and do not handle the initial capture and delivery to S3.
- ✗
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a decoupled message queue for asynchronous point-to-point delivery, not a managed stream capture service that lands clickstream events into Amazon S3. It fits buffering work between application tiers, not continuous ingestion of high-volume event data with near-real-time availability.
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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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.