DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A company uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest clickstream data. The data is then processed by a Kinesis Data Analytics application running SQL queries. The analytics application is falling behind and processing records with increasing latency. The stream has 4 shards, and the average record size is 5 KB. What is the MOST effective way to improve processing latency?
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 Kinesis Data Analytics application.
Increasing the parallelism of the Kinesis Data Analytics application (e.g., by increasing the number of in-application streams or ParallelismPerKPU) allows it to consume from the stream faster, reducing latency. Option A is wrong because 5 KB is well below the 1 MB/s shard limit, so increasing shards is unnecessary. Option B is wrong because enhanced fan-out is for consumers that need low latency, but does not help if the application is CPU-bound. Option D is wrong because increasing the retention period does not affect processing speed; it only keeps data longer.
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 to 8.
Why it's wrong here
The stream is not the bottleneck; shards are underutilized.
- ✗
Enable enhanced fan-out on the Kinesis stream for the analytics application.
Why it's wrong here
Enhanced fan-out reduces contention but does not increase processing throughput of the application.
- ✓
Increase the parallelism of the Kinesis Data Analytics application.
Why this is correct
More parallelism allows the application to process more records per unit time.
- ✗
Increase the retention period of the Kinesis stream to 7 days.
Why it's wrong here
Retention period does not affect processing speed.
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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.