DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company uses Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to process streaming data. The application reads from a Kinesis stream with 10 shards and writes to an S3 bucket. The application is experiencing high latency. Analysis shows that the application is not keeping up with the incoming data rate. Which action would MOST effectively reduce latency?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse scaling the infrastructure (KPU or shards) with scaling the application logic (parallelism), assuming that more shards or larger instances automatically resolve processing bottlenecks without explicitly tuning the Flink application's parallelism.
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
✓
Increase the Parallelism of the Flink application
The high latency is caused by the Flink application not keeping up with the incoming data rate, which indicates a processing bottleneck within the application itself. Increasing the Parallelism of the Flink application (Option B) directly increases the number of parallel subtasks that can process data concurrently, improving throughput and reducing latency. This is the most effective action because it addresses the root cause—insufficient compute resources for stream processing—without changing the source or sink configuration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of shards in the Kinesis stream
Why it's wrong here
More shards increase input rate; if the application can't keep up, it worsens latency.
- ✓
Increase the Parallelism of the Flink application
Why this is correct
Higher parallelism allows more concurrent processing.
- ✗
Enable exactly-once delivery to S3
Why it's wrong here
Exactly-once adds overhead and may increase latency.
- ✗
Use a larger Kinesis Data Analytics application (increase KPU)
Why it's wrong here
While increasing KPU can help, parallelism is more direct; KPU may be limited by default.
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
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This DEA-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,711-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.