DEA-C01 Data Operations and Support Practice Question
This DEA-C01 practice question tests your understanding of data operations and support. Read the scenario carefully and evaluate each option against the stated constraints before committing to an answer. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest clickstream data. The data is consumed by a custom consumer application that writes to Amazon S3 every 5 minutes. The consumer is falling behind and processing lag is increasing. Which action is MOST effective to reduce the lag?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Increase the number of shards in the Kinesis stream
The consumer is falling behind because the stream's throughput capacity is insufficient for the incoming data volume. Increasing the number of shards in the Kinesis stream directly increases the total read capacity (each shard provides 2 MB/s read throughput and 5 transactions/second), allowing the consumer to process more data in parallel and reduce lag.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
Switch to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver data directly to S3
Why it's wrong here
Firehose is a different service; rewriting the consumer would cause delay.
✗
Increase the batch size of records written to S3
Why it's wrong here
Larger batches can improve throughput but the consumer may still be limited by shard capacity.
✓
Increase the number of shards in the Kinesis stream
Why this is correct
More shards increase parallelism and throughput, allowing the consumer to keep up.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
✗
Reduce the retention period of the stream
Why it's wrong here
Reducing retention only drops old data; it does not help the consumer process faster.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates often confuse throughput scaling with batch size or delivery destination changes, but the only way to increase read throughput from a Kinesis stream is to increase the number of shards or use enhanced fan-out.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Each Kinesis shard supports up to 5 read transactions per second, with a maximum aggregate read rate of 2 MB/s. When a consumer falls behind, it indicates that the consumer's processing rate is slower than the write rate to the stream; adding shards increases the total read capacity, allowing the consumer to use enhanced fan-out or multiple workers to process records in parallel. In practice, you must also ensure the consumer application is designed to scale horizontally with the number of shards, using the Kinesis Client Library (KCL) which automatically distributes shards across workers.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Data Operations and Support — This question tests Data Operations and Support — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Increase the number of shards in the Kinesis stream — The consumer is falling behind because the stream's throughput capacity is insufficient for the incoming data volume. Increasing the number of shards in the Kinesis stream directly increases the total read capacity (each shard provides 2 MB/s read throughput and 5 transactions/second), allowing the consumer to process more data in parallel and reduce lag.
What should I do if I get this DEA-C01 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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