DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company uses Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver data to an S3 bucket. The data must be delivered within 60 seconds of ingestion. Currently, the delivery takes 3 minutes due to large buffer sizes. How should the engineer adjust the Firehose configuration?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates mistakenly think decreasing the buffer size alone will speed up delivery, but without adjusting the buffer interval, Firehose may still wait up to the default interval (e.g., 300 seconds) before flushing, so both parameters must be considered to meet a time-based requirement.
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
✓
Decrease the buffer interval to 60 seconds.
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivers data to S3 based on either a buffer size threshold or a buffer interval (in seconds), whichever is reached first. To ensure delivery within 60 seconds, you must decrease the buffer interval to 60 seconds, which forces Firehose to flush data to S3 every 60 seconds regardless of buffer size. The current 3-minute delay is caused by the buffer interval being larger than 60 seconds, so reducing it directly meets the requirement.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Decrease the buffer interval to 60 seconds.
Why this is correct
Lowering the buffer interval triggers delivery sooner, meeting the latency requirement.
- ✗
Increase the buffer interval to 120 seconds.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the interval would make delivery slower.
- ✗
Increase the buffer size to 128 MB.
Why it's wrong here
Larger buffer size delays delivery if data volume is low.
- ✗
Decrease the buffer size to 1 MB.
Why it's wrong here
Buffer size affects flushing based on data volume, not time; time-based flushing is controlled by buffer interval.
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.