Free Amazon Web Services Data-Engineer-Associate Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 7

The telecommunications company needs a low-latency solution to detect sudden drops in network usage from real-time data collected throughout the day.

Option B: Modify the processing application to publish the data to an Amazon Kinesis data stream. Create an Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics) application to detect drops in network usage.Using Amazon Kinesis with Managed Service for Apache Flink (formerly Kinesis Data Analytics) is ideal for real-time stream processing with minimal latency. Flink can analyze the incoming data stream in real-time and detect anomalies, such as sudden drops in usage, which makes it the best fit for this scenario.

Other options (A, C, and D) either introduce unnecessary delays (e.g., querying databases) or do not provide the same real-time, low-latency processing that is critical for this use case.

AWS Lake Formation is specifically designed to simplify fine-grained access control for data lakes stored in Amazon S3. By using Lake Formation tag-based access control (LF-TBAC), administrators can define access policies once and apply them dynamically based on tags rather than managing individual IAM policies.

LF-Tags can be assigned to databases, tables, and columns in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Departments are granted permissions based on tags, ensuring that each department can access only the data it is authorized to view. This approach scales efficiently as datasets and departments grow, which is critical for data lakes ingesting millions of records daily.

Managing IAM policies per department is operationally complex and error-prone. Redshift-based access centralization limits flexibility and introduces unnecessary infrastructure. Syncing data into an RDS database adds cost, latency, and maintenance overhead.

Lake Formation provides centralized governance, auditing, and least-privilege enforcement with minimal administrative effort, making it the optimal solution.

The requirement is to detect violations of data access policies and receive notifications with the username of the violator. AWS CloudTrail can provide object-level tracking for S3 to capture detailed API actions on specific S3 objects, including the user who performed the action.

AWS CloudTrail:

CloudTrail can monitor API calls made to an S3 bucket, including object-level API actions such as GetObject, PutObject, and DeleteObject. This will help detect access violations based on the API calls made by different users.

CloudTrail logs include details such as the user identity, which is essential for meeting the requirement of including the username in notifications.

The CloudTrail logs can be forwarded to Amazon CloudWatch to trigger alarms based on certain access patterns (e.g., violations of specific policies).

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

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]

 The best combination of resources to meet the requirements of high reliability, cost-optimization, and performance for running Apache Spark jobs on Amazon EMR is to use Amazon S3 as a persistent data store and Graviton instances for core nodes and task nodes.

Amazon S3 is a highly durable, scalable, and secure object storage service that can store any amount of data for a variety of use cases, including big data analytics1. Amazon S3 is a better choice than HDFS as a persistent data store for Amazon EMR, as it decouples the storage from the compute layer, allowing for more flexibility and cost-efficiency. Amazon S3 also supports data encryption, versioning, lifecycle management, and cross-region replication1. Amazon EMR integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3, using EMR File System (EMRFS) to access data stored in Amazon S3 buckets2. EMRFS also supports consistent view, which enables Amazon EMR to provide read-after-write consistency for Amazon S3 objects that are accessed through EMRFS2.

Graviton instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors that deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances3. Graviton instances are ideal for running workloads that are CPU-bound, memory-bound, or network-bound, such as big data analytics, web servers, and open-source databases3. Graviton instances are compatible with Amazon EMR, and can be used for both core nodes and task nodes. Core nodes are responsible for running the data processing frameworks, such as Apache Spark, and storing data in HDFS or the local file system. Task nodes are optional nodes that can be added to a cluster to increase the processing power and throughput. By using Graviton instances for both core nodes and task nodes, you can achieve higher performance and lower cost than using x86-based instances.

Using Spot Instances for all primary nodes is not a good option, as it can compromise the reliability and availability of the cluster. Spot Instances are spare EC2 instances that are available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices, but they can be interrupted by EC2 with a two-minute notice when EC2 needs the capacity back. Primary nodes are the nodes that run the cluster software, such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, and Hue, and are essential for the cluster operation. If a primary node is interrupted by EC2, the cluster will fail or become unstable. Therefore, it is recommended to use On-Demand Instances or Reserved Instances for primary nodes, and use Spot Instances only for task nodes that can tolerate interruptions. References:

Amazon S3 - Cloud Object Storage

EMR File System (EMRFS)

AWS Graviton2 Processor-Powered Amazon EC2 Instances

[Plan and Configure EC2 Instances]

[Amazon EC2 Spot Instances]

[Best Practices for Amazon EMR]

The requirement is to update the AWS Glue Data Catalog incrementally based on S3 events. Using an S3 event-based approach is the most automated and operationally efficient solution.

A. Create an S3 event-based AWS Glue crawler:

An event-based Glue crawler can automatically update the Data Catalog when new data arrives in the S3 bucket. This ensures incremental updates with minimal operational overhead.

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.

Problem Analysis:

The company must log all user activities and connection activities in Amazon Redshift for security compliance.

Key Considerations:

Redshift supports audit logging, which can be configured to write logs to an S3 bucket.

S3 provides durable, scalable, and cost-effective storage for logs.

Solution Analysis:

Option A: S3 for Logging

Standard approach for storing Redshift logs.

Easy to set up and manage with minimal cost.

Option B: Amazon EFS

EFS is unnecessary for this use case and less cost-efficient than S3.

Option C: Aurora MySQL

Using a database to store logs increases complexity and cost.

Option D: EBS Volume

EBS is not a scalable option for log storage compared to S3.

Final Recommendation:

Enable Redshift audit logging and specify an S3 bucket as the destination.

Amazon Redshift Audit Logging

Storing Logs in Amazon S3