MLS-C01 Data Engineering Practice Question
Which THREE AWS services can be used together to build a serverless data pipeline that ingests streaming data, transforms it, and loads it into Amazon Redshift for analysis?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Amazon EMR as a serverless option, but EMR requires cluster management and is not serverless, whereas Kinesis Data Firehose and Lambda provide a fully managed, serverless ingestion and transformation layer.
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 Firehose
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose (C) is the correct service because it is designed to reliably capture, transform, and load streaming data into Amazon Redshift with near-real-time latency. It can invoke AWS Lambda for on-the-fly data transformation (e.g., converting JSON to Parquet) and directly stream the processed records into Redshift via the Redshift COPY command, making it the central orchestration component for a serverless pipeline.
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 EMR
Why it's wrong here
EMR is not serverless; it requires cluster provisioning.
- ✗
Amazon SQS
Why it's wrong here
SQS is a message queue, not designed for streaming data ingestion.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
Why this is correct
Delivers transformed data directly to Redshift.
- ✓
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
Why this is correct
Captures streaming data in real-time.
- ✓
AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
Can process records from Kinesis and transform them.
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 MLS-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 MLS-C01 exam.