DEA-C01 Data Operations and Support Practice Question
A data engineer is troubleshooting an AWS Glue ETL job that fails intermittently with the error 'Rate exceeded.' The job reads from an Amazon RDS for MySQL source and writes to Amazon S3. What is the MOST likely cause of this error?
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
✓
The number of Glue job workers or parallel queries is exceeding the maximum connections or IOPS of the RDS instance.
The 'Rate exceeded' error when reading from RDS typically indicates that the number of connections or queries per second exceeds the RDS instance's maximum limits. Option A is incorrect because the job reads from RDS, not Kinesis. Option C is incorrect because S3 writes return a 503 SlowDown error, not 'Rate exceeded'. Option D is incorrect because insufficient IAM permissions cause an access denied error.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The Glue job is using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams as a source, which has a shard throughput limit.
Why it's wrong here
The source is RDS, not Kinesis.
- ✓
The number of Glue job workers or parallel queries is exceeding the maximum connections or IOPS of the RDS instance.
Why this is correct
This is the typical cause of rate exceeded errors when reading from RDS.
- ✗
The Amazon S3 bucket has a bucket policy that limits the number of objects written per second.
Why it's wrong here
S3 throttling would return a 503 SlowDown error, not 'Rate exceeded'.
- ✗
The IAM role attached to the Glue job does not have sufficient permissions to read from RDS.
Why it's wrong here
Insufficient permissions would cause access denied errors.
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.