Data-Engineer-Associate Exam Dumps - Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Data Engineer Questions and Answers

Problem Analysis:

The company needs to migrate both an application and an on-premises Apache Kafka server to AWS.

Incremental updates from an on-premises Oracle database are processed by Kafka.

The solution must follow a replatform migration strategy, prioritizing minimal changes and low management overhead.

Key Considerations:

Replatform Strategy: This approach keeps the application and architecture as close to the original as possible, reducing the need for refactoring.

The solution must provide a managed Kafka service to minimize operational burden.

Low overhead solutions like serverless services are preferred.

Solution Analysis:

Option A: Kinesis Data Streams

Kinesis Data Streams is an AWS-native streaming service but is not a direct substitute for Kafka.

This option would require significant application refactoring, which does not align with the replatform strategy.

Option B: MSK Provisioned Cluster

Managed Kafka service with fully configurable clusters.

Provides the same Kafka APIs but requires cluster management (e.g., scaling, patching), increasing management overhead.

Option C: Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Kinesis Data Firehose is designed for data delivery rather than real-time streaming and processing.

Not suitable for Kafka-based applications.

Option D: MSK Serverless

MSK Serverless eliminates the need for cluster management while maintaining compatibility with Kafka APIs.

Automatically scales based on workload, reducing operational overhead.

Ideal for replatform migrations, as it requires minimal changes to the application.

Final Recommendation:

Amazon MSK Serverless is the best solution for migrating the Kafka server and application with minimal changes and the least management overhead.

Amazon MSK Serverless Overview

Comparison of Amazon MSK and Kinesis

AWS Step Functions is a service that allows you to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use Step Functions to create state machines that define the sequence and logic of the tasks in your workflow. Step Functions supports various types of tasks, such as Lambda functions, AWS Glue jobs, Amazon EMR clusters, Amazon ECS tasks, etc. You can use Step Functions to monitor and troubleshoot your workflows, as well as to handle errors and retries.

Using an AWS Step Functions workflow that includes a state machine to run the Lambda function and then the AWS Glue job will meet the requirements with the least management overhead, as it leverages the serverless and managed capabilities of Step Functions. You do not need to write any code to orchestrate the tasks in your workflow, as you can use the Step Functions console or the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to define and deploy your state machine. You also do not need to provision or manage any servers or clusters, as Step Functions scales automatically based on the demand.

The other options are not as efficient as using an AWS Step Functions workflow. Using an Apache Airflow workflow that is deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance or on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) will require more management overhead, as you will need to provision, configure, and maintain the EC2 instance or the EKS cluster, as well as the Airflow components. You will also need to write and maintain the Airflow DAGs to orchestrate the tasks in your workflow. Using an AWS Glue workflow to run the Lambda function and then the AWS Glue job will not work, as AWS Glue workflows only support AWS Glue jobs and crawlers as tasks, not Lambda functions. References:

AWS Step Functions

AWS Glue

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide, Chapter 6: Data Integration and Transformation, Section 6.3: AWS Step Functions

Lake Formation requires that S3 locations be registered before they can be accessed by AWS Glue crawlers, jobs, or queries. Registering the location associates it with the Lake Formation permissions framework.

“Before AWS Glue crawlers can access an S3 path managed by Lake Formation, the S3 location must be registered in Lake Formation.”

– Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification - version 2 - apple.pdf

AWS Glue streaming jobs are purpose-built for low-latency, near real-time ETL pipelines.

Glue Studio allows visual job authoring and supports complex transformations, including joins with Amazon RDS databases, through JDBC connectors.

Data can be written directly to S3 in Apache Parquet format using built-in AWS Glue support.

Options B and C are more suitable for batch or development/testing. Option D is for custom batch jobs, not real-time processing.

“You can use AWS Glue streaming jobs with Glue Studio to process streaming data, perform transformations, join with RDS data sources, and write results in formats like Parquet to S3.”

The company is using a data mesh architecture with AWS Lake Formation for governance and needs to share specific subsets of data with different teams (marketing and compliance) using Amazon Redshift Serverless.

Option A: Create views of the tables that need to be shared. Include only the required columns.Creating views in Amazon Redshift that include only the necessary columns allows for fine-grained access control. This method ensures that each team has access to only the data they are authorized to view.

Option E: Share the Amazon Redshift data share to the Amazon Redshift Serverless workgroup in the marketing team ' s account.Amazon Redshift data sharing enables live access to data across Redshift clusters or Serverless workgroups. By sharing data with specific workgroups, you can ensure that the marketing team and compliance team each access the relevant subset of data based on the views created.

Option B (creating a Redshift data share) is close but does not address the fine-grained column-level access.

Option C (creating a managed VPC endpoint) is unnecessary for sharing data with specific teams.

Option D (sharing with the Lake Formation catalog) is incorrect because Redshift data shares do not integrate directly with Lake Formation catalogs; they are specific to Redshift workgroups.

In Amazon Redshift, the SUPER data type is designed specifically to handle semi-structured data like JSON, Parquet, ORC, and others. By using the SUPER data type, Redshift can ingest and query JSON data without requiring complex data flattening processes, thus reducing the amount of preprocessing required before loading the data. The SUPER data type also works seamlessly with Redshift Spectrum, enabling complex queries that can combine both structured and semi-structured datasets, which aligns with the company’s need to use combined datasets to identify potential new customers.

Using the SUPER data type also allows for automatic parsing and query processing of nested data structures through Amazon Redshift ' s PARTITION BY and JSONPATH expressions, which makes this option the most efficient approach with the least effort involved. This reduces the overhead associated with using tools like AWS Glue or Lambda for data transformation.

Amazon Redshift Documentation - SUPER Data Type

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Training: Building Batch Data Analytics Solutions on AWS

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Study Guide

By directly leveraging the capabilities of Redshift with the SUPER data type, the data engineer ensures streamlined JSON ingestion with minimal effort while maintaining query efficiency.

The performance issue in Amazon Redshift Spectrum queries arises due to the nature of CSV files, which are row-based storage formats. Spectrum is more optimized for columnar formats, which significantly improve performance by reducing the amount of data scanned. Also, partitioning data based on relevant columns like order date can further reduce the amount of data scanned, as queries can focus only on the necessary partitions.

A. Configure the third-party application to create the files in a columnar format:

Columnar formats (like Parquet or ORC) store data in a way that is optimized for analytical queries because they allow queries to scan only the columns required, rather than scanning all columns in a row-based format like CSV.

Amazon Redshift Spectrum works much more efficiently with columnar formats, reducing the amount of data that needs to be scanned, which improves query performance.

Apache Parquet is a columnar storage format that is much more space-efficient than row-based formats like CSV, especially for analytics workloads. Transforming data from CSV to Parquet significantly reduces storage costs and improves query performance. According to the study guide:

“Parquet is a columnar storage file format that is optimized for use with analytics workloads, providing efficient storage and fast query performance.”

– Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification - version 2 - apple.pdf

By switching to Parquet, the company can reduce both storage size and retrieval times, making it the optimal choice for cost-effective data analysis.

AWS Glue is a fully managed serverless ETL service that can handle various data sources and formats, including .csv files in Amazon S3. AWS Glue provides two types of jobs: PySpark and Python shell. PySpark jobs use Apache Spark to process large-scale data in parallel, while Python shell jobs use Python scripts to process small-scale data in a single execution environment. For this requirement, a Python shell job is more suitable and cost-effective, as the size of each S3 object is less than 100 MB, which does not require distributed processing. A Python shell job can use pandas, a popular Python library for data analysis, to transform the .csv data as needed. The other solutions are not optimal or relevant for this requirement. Writing a custom Python application and hosting it on an Amazon EKS cluster would require more effort and resources to set up and manage the Kubernetes environment, as well as to handle the data ingestion and transformation logic. Writing a PySpark ETL script and hosting it on an Amazon EMR cluster would also incur more costs and complexity to provision and configure the EMR cluster, as well as to use Apache Spark for processing small data files. Writing an AWS Glue PySpark job would also be less efficient and economical than a Python shell job, as it would involve unnecessary overhead and charges for using Apache Spark for small data files. References:

AWS Glue

Working with Python Shell Jobs

pandas

[AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide]

The correct answer is to configure AWS Glue triggers to run the ETL jobs every hour and use AWS Glue connections to establish connectivity between the data sources and Amazon Redshift. AWS Glue triggers are a way to schedule and orchestrate ETL jobs with the least operational overhead. AWS Glue connections are a way to securely connect to data sources and targets using JDBC or MongoDB drivers. AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that does not support MongoDB as a data source. AWS Lambda functions are a serverless option to schedule and run ETL jobs, but they have a limit of 15 minutes for execution time, which may not be enough for complex transformations. The Redshift Data API is a way to run SQL commands on Amazon Redshift clusters without needing a persistent connection, but it does not support loading data from AWS Glue ETL jobs. References:

AWS Glue triggers

AWS Glue connections

AWS Glue DataBrew

[AWS Lambda functions]

[Redshift Data API]