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DEA-C01 practice question: Streaming ingestion with Kinesis and MSK (2 of 3)

Data Ingestion and Transformation A free question from our original DEA-C01 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.

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A ski resort group sends lift-scan events from its gates into one Amazon Kinesis Data Streams stream. The producer uses the resort ID as the partition key, so most events come from three large resorts and land on one or two shards.

During holiday weekends, the producers get ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors on those shards, while the other shards sit almost idle. No scan can be lost, and the group must keep the existing stream and consumers.

Which change meets these requirements?

Choose one answer.

  1. A. Increase the stream's retention period so producers can retry for longer before the records expire.
  2. B. Change the partition key to a high-cardinality value, such as gate or device ID, so records spread across shards.
  3. C. Switch the stream to on-demand capacity mode and keep the resort ID as the partition key.
  4. D. Turn off producer retries so that throttled writes fail fast, and let each gate keep the rejected records locally.
Show the answer and explanation

Answer: B

  • A. Wrong: Retention decides how long records stay readable, not how fast they can be written. Longer retention does not stop writes to the hot shards from being throttled. Learn more: Change the data retention period (opens in a new tab)
  • B. Right: Correct. Kinesis maps each partition key to a shard by hash, so a key with many distinct values spreads the load. The stream and consumers stay the same, and the idle shards start to carry traffic. Learn more: What is Amazon Kinesis Data Streams? (opens in a new tab)
  • C. Wrong: On-demand mode adds capacity across the stream, but all records with one partition key still go to one shard. That shard's per-shard write limit still applies, so the largest resort keeps getting throttled.
  • D. Wrong: Failing fast does not spread the load, and the records would sit on gate devices instead of reaching the stream. Scans must not be lost, so this option breaks a stated requirement.

Explanation

A hot shard comes from a partition key with few distinct values, not from the stream's total capacity. Choosing a key with many values, such as a gate or device ID, spreads records across shards and removes the throttling, with no change to the stream or consumers. Retention, on-demand mode and retry changes do not fix the key's distribution.

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