Courseiva
← Back to AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 questions

Scenario-based practice

Hard Difficulty Questions

Practise AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 practice questions — original exam-style scenarios covering every exam domain, with detailed explanations, wrong-answer analysis, and common exam traps.

Start full practice testRead exam guide
20
scenario questions
DEA-C01
exam code
Amazon Web Services
vendor

Scenario guide

How to approach hard difficulty questions

These are the questions most candidates get wrong. They require connecting multiple concepts, reading tricky output, or knowing edge-case behaviour that isn't on most study cards. Practising them trains you to operate under uncertainty — a necessary skill on the real exam.

Quick answer

Hard Difficulty Questions questions test whether you can apply the concept in context, not just recognise a definition.

How the topic appears in realistic exam-style scenarios.

Which detail in the question changes the correct answer.

How to eliminate plausible but wrong options.

How to connect the question back to the wider exam objective.

Related practice questions

Related DEA-C01 topic practice pages

Scenario questions usually connect to one or more exam topics. Use these links to review the underlying concepts behind the scenario.

Data Ingestion and Transformation practice questions

Targeted DEA-C01 practice covering Data Ingestion and Transformation.

Data Operations and Support practice questions

Targeted DEA-C01 practice covering Data Operations and Support.

Data Security and Governance practice questions

Targeted DEA-C01 practice covering Data Security and Governance.

Data Store Management practice questions

Sharpen your DEA-C01 knowledge of Data Store Management.

DEA-C01 fundamentals practice questions

Work through DEA-C01 questions on DEA-C01 fundamentals.

DEA-C01 scenario practice questions

DEA-C01 scenario practice questions for DEA-C01.

DEA-C01 troubleshooting practice questions

Targeted DEA-C01 practice covering DEA-C01 troubleshooting.

Practice set

Practice scenarios

Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineering team uses Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to process streaming data. They notice that the application's checkpointing is failing intermittently, causing data reprocessing. The application uses a large state. Which configuration change should the team make to improve checkpoint reliability?

Question 2hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company is using Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity for a gaming application that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. The application consistently sees 'ProvisionedThroughputExceededException' errors during spikes. The data engineer needs to resolve this issue without changing the application code. What should the engineer do?

Question 3hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company is using Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ. The database has a 500 GB data file and 100 GB log file. The application experiences high latency during peak hours. Monitoring shows high WriteIOPS on the primary. Which change will reduce latency without losing the ability to failover?

Question 4hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineer is designing a streaming pipeline that ingests data from an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream (with 5 shards) into Amazon S3. The data must be transformed using a complex stateful operation that cannot be done in a Lambda function (limited to 15 minutes). The engineer needs a solution that can maintain state across multiple records. Which service should be used?

Question 5hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company is using AWS Glue to run ETL jobs that write data to an Amazon S3 data lake. The jobs are failing with '503 Slow Down' errors. The data engineering team has already implemented retries. What is the BEST long-term solution?

Question 6hardmulti select
Full question →

Which THREE factors should a data engineer consider when choosing between Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB for a new application? (Choose THREE.)

Question 7hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineer is designing a data ingestion pipeline for a social media analytics platform. The pipeline must ingest tweets in real-time, perform sentiment analysis, and store results in Amazon S3. The sentiment analysis is compute-intensive and must be done as the data arrives. The estimated throughput is 10,000 tweets per second. Which architecture is most suitable?

Question 8hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A healthcare company processes patient records in near-real-time using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. Each record contains sensitive personal health information (PHI). The data must be encrypted at rest and in transit. The company also needs to audit access to the data. The data engineer is designing the ingestion pipeline. Which combination of services and configurations meets these requirements?

Question 9hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company runs a data pipeline that uses Amazon EMR to process large datasets. The pipeline reads data from S3, processes it using Spark, and writes results back to S3. Recently, the pipeline has been failing with 'OutOfMemoryError' in the Spark executors. The EMR cluster is configured with 5 core nodes of type m5.xlarge (4 vCPU, 16 GB memory each). The Spark application uses dynamic allocation and default Spark configurations. The input data size is approximately 500 GB in Parquet format. What is the most cost-effective way to resolve the out-of-memory errors?

Question 10hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A CloudFormation template includes this IAM policy for a cross-account S3 upload use case. What is the purpose of the condition?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

IamPolicyDocument:
  Version: '2012-10-17'
  Statement:
    - Effect: Allow
      Action:
        - 's3:GetObject'
        - 's3:PutObject'
      Resource: 'arn:aws:s3:::my-bucket/*'
      Condition:
        StringEquals:
          's3:x-amz-acl': 'bucket-owner-full-control'
Question 11hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineer is troubleshooting a Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream that is experiencing high error rates when writing to an S3 bucket. The error logs indicate 'AccessDenied' errors. The S3 bucket policy allows access from the Firehose service, but the errors persist. What is the most likely cause?

Question 12hardmulti select
Full question →

A data engineer is designing a data lake on Amazon S3 for analytics. The data includes sensitive PII that must be encrypted at rest. The company requires that the encryption keys be managed by the company's own hardware security module (HSM) and rotated every 90 days. Which TWO options meet these requirements? (Choose TWO.)

Question 13hardmulti select
Full question →

Which THREE factors should a data engineer consider when choosing between Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB for storing time-series data? (Choose three.)

Question 14hardmultiple choice
Review the full subnetting walkthrough →

A company runs a nightly AWS Glue ETL job that writes results to an Amazon Redshift table using the JDBC connector. Recently, the job has been failing with the error 'ERROR: connection to server at ... failed: server closed the connection unexpectedly'. The Redshift cluster is in a private subnet with a VPC endpoint for S3. The Glue job runs in the same VPC with enhanced VPC routing enabled. Which is the most likely cause?

Question 15hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company has an Amazon RDS for MySQL database that is experiencing performance issues due to a large number of read requests. The application is read-heavy and can tolerate eventually consistent reads. Which action will reduce the load on the primary database with the least operational overhead?

Question 16hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A company uses Amazon DynamoDB to store session data for a web application. The application experiences occasional spikes in traffic, causing throttling on the table. The data engineer needs to implement a solution that handles traffic spikes without manual intervention and minimizes cost. What should the data engineer do?

Question 17hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineering team is managing an Amazon Redshift cluster that is used for BI reporting. The cluster has a mix of large tables (some over 1 TB) and many smaller tables. The team notices that queries on a large fact table are slow. The fact table is distributed using KEY distribution on the customer_id column, which has high cardinality. The team wants to improve query performance. They have the option to change the distribution style and sort key. Which redesign should they implement?

Question 18hardmulti select
Full question →

Which THREE of the following are benefits of using Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX)? (Choose three.)

Question 19hardmultiple choice
Full question →

Refer to the exhibit. A data engineer has attached this bucket policy to an S3 bucket named data-lake-bucket. The engineer wants to allow only GET requests from the corporate network (10.0.0.0/16) over HTTPS. However, users report that they cannot access objects even when connected to the corporate network. What is the issue?

Exhibit

Refer to the exhibit.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Principal": "*",
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket/*",
                "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "Bool": {
                    "aws:SecureTransport": "false"
                }
            }
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": "*",
            "Action": "s3:GetObject",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::data-lake-bucket/*",
            "Condition": {
                "IpAddress": {
                    "aws:SourceIp": "10.0.0.0/16"
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}
Question 20hardmultiple choice
Full question →

A data engineering team is ingesting data from multiple sources into Amazon S3 using AWS Glue ETL jobs. The jobs are failing intermittently with the error: 'Task ran out of memory'. The input data size varies widely from 100 MB to 10 GB per job. Which configuration change would best mitigate this issue?

These DEA-C01 practice questions are part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style DEA-C01 questions with detailed explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics.