DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineer is designing a data ingestion pipeline for clickstream data from a mobile app. The data volume varies, with occasional spikes up to 10 MB/s. The pipeline must persist the raw data in Amazon S3 and make it available for near-real-time analytics via Amazon Athena. Which combination of services minimizes cost and operational overhead?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates choose Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with Lambda (Option C) because they think it provides more control, but they overlook Lambda's concurrency limits and the operational burden of managing stream shards, making Firehose the simpler and cheaper choice for raw data ingestion to S3.
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 with direct delivery to Amazon S3, then Amazon Athena
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is the most cost-effective and low-overhead solution for ingesting variable-volume clickstream data (up to 10 MB/s) into Amazon S3 because it is a fully managed service that automatically scales, buffers, and compresses data before delivery. It integrates directly with S3 without requiring custom code or infrastructure management, and the data is immediately queryable by Amazon Athena with no additional transformation steps.
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 Kinesis Data Streams with Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics, then Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Overkill for simple persistence; adds unnecessary cost.
- ✗
Amazon SQS with an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances writing to Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Requires managing EC2 and scaling policies.
- ✗
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams with AWS Lambda for transformation, then Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
Kinesis Data Streams has per-shard costs and Lambda adds complexity.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose with direct delivery to Amazon S3, then Amazon Athena
Why this is correct
Firehose is fully managed, scales automatically, and delivers to S3.
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
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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.