DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineer needs to ingest streaming data from thousands of IoT devices into AWS for real-time processing. The data volume peaks at 5 GB/min. Which AWS service should be used as the ingestion endpoint?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse AWS Glue's streaming ETL capability (which reads from a stream but does not ingest) with a direct ingestion endpoint, or they assume S3's high durability makes it suitable for real-time ingestion, ignoring its lack of streaming semantics and low-latency write guarantees.
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 Streams
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time data ingestion at scale, supporting throughput of up to 1 MB/s or 1,000 records/s per shard. With a peak of 5 GB/min (~83 MB/s), you can horizontally scale by adding shards to meet the required throughput, making it the ideal ingestion endpoint for high-volume streaming IoT data.
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
Why this is correct
Kinesis Data Streams is built for real-time streaming data ingestion.
- ✗
AWS Glue
Why it's wrong here
Glue is for batch ETL, not real-time streaming.
- ✗
Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
S3 is object storage, not designed for real-time streaming ingestion.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda is a compute service, not an ingestion endpoint for streaming data.
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Same concept, more angles
2 more ways this is tested on DEA-C01
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A data engineer needs to ingest streaming data from a social media API into Amazon S3 for batch analytics. The data arrives at a rate of 500 records per second. Which service should be used to capture the stream?
easy- A.Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
- B.Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
- ✓ C.Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
- D.Amazon MQ
Why C: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time streaming data ingestion at scale, supporting throughput of up to 1 MB/s or 1,000 records per second per shard. With 500 records per second, Kinesis can reliably capture and store the social media API data for up to 365 days, enabling batch analytics via S3 delivery through Kinesis Firehose or custom consumers.
Variation 2. A data engineer needs to ingest streaming data from thousands of IoT devices and immediately process each record with minimal latency. Which AWS service should be used as the ingestion point?
easy- A.AWS Lambda
- B.Amazon S3
- ✓ C.Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
- D.AWS Glue
Why C: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time streaming data ingestion with low latency. AWS Glue is for batch ETL, S3 is object storage, and Lambda is compute but not an ingestion endpoint itself.
JA
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.