DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineer needs to schedule a nightly ETL job that reads from an Amazon RDS database and writes to Amazon S3 in Parquet format. The solution must be serverless and minimize cost. Which TWO AWS services should be used? (Choose TWO.)
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 S3
AWS Glue can run serverless ETL jobs. Amazon S3 is the destination. Lambda could trigger but not run the ETL itself; Data Pipeline is not serverless; Athena is query-only.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
AWS Data Pipeline
Why it's wrong here
Data Pipeline is not serverless; it runs on EC2 instances.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda can trigger jobs but is not suitable for long-running ETL with large data volumes.
- ✗
Amazon Athena
Why it's wrong here
Athena is for querying data, not for transforming and writing it.
- ✓
Amazon S3
Why this is correct
S3 is the destination for the transformed data.
- ✓
AWS Glue
Why this is correct
Glue provides serverless Spark ETL jobs that can read from RDS and write 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.