DEA-C01 Tests Picking the Lowest-Overhead Pipeline That Meets the Latency Target
An associate exam for engineers who build and run data pipelines on AWS. Several options usually work; the shift is choosing the serverless or managed path that meets latency and cost with the least operational effort.
Check Your Readiness →Most candidates understand AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) concepts — and still fail. This exam tests how you apply knowledge under pressure.
Questions read like design reviews: source, arrival pattern, volume, latency target and a cost or operations constraint, then the service or pipeline order. Guide v1.1 only merged the knowledge and skills lists; domains, weights and all 17 task statements are unchanged.
Trigger a Lambda function to process the file
Lambda stops at 15 minutes and has limited memory and storage. An AWS Glue Spark job handles this serverlessly; choose EMR only when you need custom frameworks, instance control or Spot pricing.
Reload the full prefix each run to stay consistent
Enable Glue job bookmarks so each run processes only new data, or trigger on S3 event notifications through EventBridge. Full reloads waste DPU hours and create duplicates downstream.
Move it to Redshift Serverless to save money
Serverless saves money for intermittent or unpredictable demand. Steady, heavy usage is usually cheaper on provisioned nodes with reserved pricing, with concurrency scaling covering occasional peaks.
Search CloudTrail for the PutBucketEncryption call
AWS Config records resource configuration history and evaluates compliance over time. CloudTrail shows who made API calls and CloudTrail Lake helps investigations, but neither is the configuration timeline auditors asked for.
Schedule a nightly Lambda to scan and delete old items
DynamoDB Time to Live deletes items once a timestamp attribute passes, without consuming write capacity, and the deletions appear in DynamoDB Streams for archiving. S3 Lifecycle expiration plays the same role for objects.
Firehose delivers to S3, Redshift, OpenSearch and other targets with no consumer code, but keeps nothing for replay. Kinesis Data Streams retains records for the configured period so a new consumer can reprocess them. MSK fits teams that need Kafka APIs.
Records with the same partition key always map to one shard, so extra shards leave the hotspot in place. Use a higher-cardinality partition key. The same logic applies to Glue Spark jobs where one skewed key exhausts a single executor.
For partitions that follow a predictable date pattern, Athena partition projection computes them without catalog updates, and ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION registers them precisely. Crawlers suit unknown or changing schemas; MSCK REPAIR TABLE works but rescans prefixes.
Bucket policies act on whole objects and prefixes. Column, row and cell-level restrictions on Data Catalog tables come from AWS Lake Formation grants, which Athena, Redshift Spectrum and EMR honor. Macie can find the PII but never blocks access.
Query it in place: Redshift Spectrum reads S3 files from the cluster, and Athena charges per data scanned. Store archives as partitioned Parquet to cut scan cost. Federated query targets operational databases such as RDS and Aurora, not S3 files.
Strengthen weak areas with exam-style practice questions and detailed explanations.
Simulate the real exam experience and assess your readiness under timed conditions.
Review key concepts, objectives, and exam topics in one place.
Get personalized explanations, learning recommendations, and instant answers.
Follow a structured learning path designed to help you prepare efficiently.
DEA-C01 rewards the least-overhead pipeline that meets the target. See which service choices you still miss.