DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
A real-time analytics application uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. The consumer application falls behind, causing increased latency. Which action would MOST effectively improve throughput?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse producer-side optimizations (like KPL batch size or Firehose buffering) with consumer-side throughput issues, or they assume enhanced fan-out alone solves a shard-scaling problem without recognizing that the root cause is insufficient shard count for the consumer's processing rate.
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
✓
Increase the number of shards in the data stream.
Increasing the number of shards in the Kinesis Data Stream directly increases the stream's read capacity (each shard supports up to 2 MB/s read and 5 transactions per second for shared throughput). This allows the consumer application to process more data in parallel, reducing the backlog and latency. The question specifies a consumer application falling behind, which is a read-throughput bottleneck, and scaling shards is the most effective way to address it.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Reduce the RecordMaxBufferedTime parameter in the Firehose delivery stream.
Why it's wrong here
This parameter is for Firehose, not Kinesis Data Streams.
- ✓
Increase the number of shards in the data stream.
Why this is correct
More shards increase parallelism and throughput capacity.
- ✗
Increase the batch size in the Kinesis Producer Library.
Why it's wrong here
Larger batches increase throughput but consumer may still be slow due to shard limits.
- ✗
Use enhanced fan-out to dedicate a shard per consumer.
Why it's wrong here
Enhanced fan-out reduces latency but does not increase total throughput.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This DEA-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,711-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.