DEA-C01 Data Ingestion and Transformation Practice Question
Network Topology
Refer to the exhibit. A data engineer is troubleshooting a Kinesis Data Streams consumer that is falling behind. The stream has 2 shards and is receiving data at a rate of 2 MB/s. The consumer is an AWS Lambda function with a batch size of 100 records. What should the engineer do to improve consumer throughput?
⚠ Common exam trap
The DEA-C01 exam often tests the misconception that Lambda memory or batch size adjustments are the primary levers for throughput, when in fact the shard count directly controls the parallelism and read capacity of a Kinesis stream consumer.
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 stream to 4
Increasing the number of shards to 4 doubles the stream's total ingestion capacity to 4 MB/s, which directly increases the number of concurrent Lambda invocations and thus consumer throughput. With 2 shards, each shard can support up to 1 MB/s input and 2 MB/s output, so the current 2 MB/s load is at the shard-level output limit, causing the consumer to fall behind.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Decrease the Lambda batch size to 10 records
Why it's wrong here
Smaller batch size reduces efficiency and throughput.
- ✗
Increase the retention period of the stream to 168 hours
Why it's wrong here
Does not affect throughput.
- ✓
Increase the number of shards in the stream to 4
Why this is correct
More shards increase parallelism and throughput for both producers and consumers.
- ✗
Increase the memory allocation of the Lambda function
Why it's wrong here
May help if CPU-bound, but not the primary bottleneck for a 2-shard stream.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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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.