DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A data engineering team needs to ingest streaming data from thousands of IoT devices and store it in Amazon S3 for batch processing. The data arrives at a rate of 10 MB/s, with occasional spikes up to 50 MB/s. The data must be processed in near real-time with minimal latency. Which AWS service should be used for ingestion?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse Amazon SQS with a streaming service, but SQS is a pull-based queue with no ordering guarantees across multiple consumers, whereas Kinesis Data Streams provides ordered, replayable, and near-real-time data ingestion.
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 streaming data ingestion at scale, handling throughput from megabytes to gigabytes per second with low latency. It can absorb the described 10 MB/s baseline and 50 MB/s spikes by sharding, and integrates directly with AWS Lambda or Kinesis Data Firehose to land data into Amazon S3 for batch processing.
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 DynamoDB Streams
Why it's wrong here
Captures changes to DynamoDB tables, not external IoT data.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why this is correct
Designed for real-time data streaming with high throughput and S3 integration via Kinesis Firehose.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
SQS is for message queues, not real-time streaming at high throughput.
- ✗
Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
S3 is storage, not a streaming ingestion service.
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.