AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate
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Exam domains
The DEA-C01 questions are grouped into 4 domains divided into 17 tasks.
DEA-C01 example questions
One example question per domain from the DEA-C01 question bank, with the correct answer and its explanation. Sign in to the simulator to answer them with all answer options.
You are working as a Data Engineer at a healthcare company that captures real-time patient data from numerous medical devices. The data from these devices are streamed continuously to an Amazon Kinesis Data Stream. To ensure low latency and durability, you decide to distribute the data to multiple downstream services for immediate processing. Several machine learning models and storage solutions need to consume this data simultaneously with different processing workloads. Due to the varying requirements, you aim to achieve a fan-out pattern. Furthermore, alerts and notifications need to be sent to healthcare professionals based on specific thresholds. You decide to use Amazon SNS for this purpose. What is the most appropriate way to set up the system to achieve this?
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CORRECT ANSWERCreate an Amazon SNS topic and subscribe different Amazon SQS queues, AWS Lambda functions, and HTTP endpoints to the SNS topic. Stream data from Amazon Kinesis to the SNS topic for distribution.
This solution allows multiple downstream consumers to subscribe to the SNS topic, enabling a fan-out pattern. Each consumer can handle the data independently, meeting different processing workloads.
You are a data engineer for a financial analytics firm, responsible for managing and analyzing large datasets. The firm’s transactional data is stored in an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The analytical workload has increased significantly, and you need to speed up your data queries. You decide to store a subset of this data in Amazon Redshift for faster querying and reporting. What is the most efficient method to move and keep this data in sync while ensuring minimal impact on the Amazon Aurora database performance?
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CORRECT ANSWERUse Amazon Redshift federated queries to query the data directly from Amazon Aurora.
Amazon Redshift federated queries allow you to query data across operational and analytic databases without moving data, thereby maintaining performance and ensuring up-to-date data.
You are a data engineer at a company that collects large volumes of data from IoT devices. The data is streamed into an S3 bucket in near real-time. Your task is to automate the processing of this data using AWS services. The processing needs to be triggered at the arrival of new files in the S3 bucket, and you have decided to use AWS Batch for the processing jobs. Which combination of AWS services can be used to automate this data processing workflow?
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CORRECT ANSWERUse Amazon EventBridge to detect new files in the S3 bucket and trigger an AWS Batch job with the necessary processing configurations.
Amazon EventBridge can capture S3 events and invoke an AWS Batch job to process the new data, effectively automating the data processing workflow.
You are a data engineer at a financial services company and are responsible for setting up a secure data pipeline. You've been asked to grant access to a specific Amazon S3 bucket only to your analytics team so they can run queries for the quarterly financial reports. The team members should only have read access to the bucket. You already have an IAM group named 'AnalyticsTeam'. To ensure security, you decide to use AWS PrivateLink to keep the data transfer within the AWS network. What is the best way to achieve this?
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CORRECT ANSWERAttach a read-only IAM policy to the 'AnalyticsTeam' group and configure an S3 VPC endpoint using AWS PrivateLink.
This solution uses IAM policies to define the necessary read permissions and employs AWS PrivateLink to secure the data transfer by keeping it within the AWS network.
Exam mode and practice mode
| Exam mode | Practice mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Questions count | 65 | 1 - 75 |
| Time limit | 130 minutes | Optional, 10 - 200 minutes |
| Exam scope | 4 domains with the official questions ratio | Selected domains with the official questions ratio |
| Correct answers | After exam submission | After exam submission or after each answer |
| Question types | Mix of single and multiple correct answers | Single, multiple or both |
| Question hints | Never | Optional |
| Question domain | Revealed after exam submission | Revealed after submission or during the exam |
| Scoring | 15 of 65 questions do not count towards the result | Official AWS method or mathematical mean |
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About the DEA-C01 exam
The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam is recognized as a demanding certification that validates a candidate's expertise in managing and optimizing data-driven workflows within the AWS ecosystem. While this exam is geared towards professionals with a background in data engineering, it is by no means an easy feat and requires a thorough understanding of both foundational and advanced AWS data services.
The DEA-C01 exam covers a broad range of topics, including but not limited to, data ingestion, transformation, storage, and visualization within AWS. Candidates must demonstrate a solid grasp of essential AWS data services such as Amazon Redshift, Glue, S3, and Kinesis, along with a deep understanding of how to architect and maintain scalable, secure, and high-performing data pipelines.
A critical component of the exam focuses on data processing frameworks like Apache Spark and Hadoop, as well as an understanding of database services, both relational (RDS, Aurora) and non-relational (DynamoDB). Additionally, the exam tests the candidate's ability to apply machine learning workflows using services like Amazon SageMaker within a data engineering context.
Security and compliance are integral to the exam, emphasizing the need for candidates to understand AWS's shared responsibility model and implement best practices for data governance, encryption, and access management. Services such as IAM, KMS, and AWS Lake Formation are frequently tested to ensure candidates can securely manage data at scale.
In this exam, candidates are also expected to distinguish between various data storage and retrieval solutions, optimizing them based on specific use cases and cost considerations. This includes knowing when to utilize services like S3 for unstructured data versus using Redshift for structured data analytics.
Overall, the questions in the DEA-C01 exam are designed to challenge both theoretical knowledge and practical application, with scenarios that require candidates to design, implement, and optimize complex data architectures. While the exam avoids overly complicated wording, the difficulty lies in the depth of knowledge requi
Services on the exam
All 70 AWS services that can appear on the DEA-C01 exam.