DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineer is designing an ingestion pipeline where AWS Lambda processes records from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. During peak traffic, records are being reprocessed and some are lost. The engineer needs to make the consumer resilient to failures and avoid duplicate processing. (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming higher concurrency or smaller batches fix Kinesis consumer reliability, when the real issue is bounded retries and a failure destination for undeliverable records.
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
✓
Enable a dead-letter queue or on-failure destination for the event source mapping.
Bisect-on-error with a bounded retry count isolates and stops poison records from blocking a shard, while an on-failure destination captures records that exhaust retries so they are not lost. Together they make the Kinesis consumer resilient and give operators a recovery path. Concurrency, starting position, and batch size changes do not address the underlying failure-handling gaps.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Enable a dead-letter queue or on-failure destination for the event source mapping.
Why this is correct
Configuring an on-failure destination, such as an SQS queue or SNS topic, captures records that exceed the maximum retry count so they are not silently lost. This gives operators visibility and a path to reprocess failed records after fixing the root cause, which supports resilience.
- ✓
Configure the event source mapping with a bisect-on-error function response and a maximum retry count.
Why this is correct
Bisect-on-error splits a failing batch to isolate the problematic record, and setting a maximum retry count bounds retries before records are sent to a failure destination. Together they prevent an entire batch from blocking the shard and stop infinite reprocessing of poison records, improving resilience.
- ✗
Increase the Lambda function's reserved concurrency to match the number of shards.
Why it's wrong here
Reserved concurrency controls how many concurrent invocations are allowed, but Kinesis event source mappings process one batch per shard at a time. Raising concurrency does not prevent reprocessing or loss; it can even throttle other functions sharing the account concurrency pool.
- ✗
Reduce the batch size to one record to eliminate any possibility of duplicates.
Why it's wrong here
A batch size of one reduces the blast radius of a failure but does not eliminate duplicates, because Kinesis can still redeliver a record if the function fails after processing but before checkpointing. It also drastically lowers throughput, harming the pipeline's ability to handle peak traffic.
- ✗
Set the starting position to LATEST so the consumer only reads new records.
Why it's wrong here
Starting at LATEST skips records already in the stream, which can cause data loss for a consumer that needs to process all data. It does not address reprocessing on failure and would make the loss problem worse rather than improving resilience.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.