DEA-C01 Data Operations and Support Practice Question
A data engineer notices that a nightly AWS Glue ETL job has been failing for the past three days with the error 'Unable to locate credentials'. The job uses an IAM role for execution. What is the most likely cause of this error?
⚠ Common exam trap
AWS often tests the distinction between IAM role trust policies (who can assume the role) and IAM role permission policies (what actions the role can perform), and candidates mistakenly focus on permission policies when the error is about credential acquisition.
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 IAM role's trust policy does not include glue.amazonaws.com as a trusted entity.
The error 'Unable to locate credentials' indicates that the AWS Glue job cannot obtain AWS credentials to authenticate API calls. Since the job uses an IAM role for execution, the most likely cause is that the trust policy of that IAM role does not include 'glue.amazonaws.com' as a trusted entity. Without this trust relationship, AWS Glue cannot assume the role and thus has no credentials to sign requests.
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 IAM role does not have an access key attached.
Why it's wrong here
Glue jobs use IAM roles, not access keys.
- ✗
The S3 bucket name in the job parameters is misspelled.
Why it's wrong here
A misspelled bucket name would cause a different error, not a credentials error.
- ✓
The IAM role's trust policy does not include glue.amazonaws.com as a trusted entity.
Why this is correct
Without the trust policy, Glue cannot assume the role and gets 'Unable to locate credentials'.
- ✗
The JDBC connection string contains an incorrect password.
Why it's wrong here
The error is about credentials, not a password for a database connection.
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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.