Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer Exam (DEA-C01) — 2024 Edition

8 min readJun 19, 2024

Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer Exam (DEA-C01): Mastering AWS Services for Data Ingestion, Transformation, and Pipeline Orchestration

Unlock the full potential of AWS and elevate your data engineering skills with “Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer Exam.” This comprehensive guide is tailored for professionals seeking to master the AWS Certified Data Engineer — Associate certification. Authored by Etienne Noumen, a seasoned Professional Engineer with over 20 years of software engineering experience and 5+ years specializing in AWS data engineering, this book provides an in-depth and practical approach to conquering the certification exam.

Get the AWS DEA-C01 Exam Prep App Book or App here:

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Inside this book, you will find:

• Detailed Exam Coverage: Understand the core AWS services related to data engineering, including data ingestion, transformation, and pipeline orchestration.

• Practice Quizzes: Challenge yourself with practice quizzes designed to simulate the actual exam, complete with detailed explanations for each answer.

• Real-World Scenarios: Learn how to apply AWS services to real-world data engineering problems, ensuring you can translate theoretical knowledge into practical skills.

• Hands-On Labs: Gain hands-on experience with step-by-step labs that guide you through using AWS services like AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and more.

• Expert Insights: Benefit from the expertise of Etienne Noumen, who shares valuable tips, best practices, and insights from his extensive career in data engineering.

This book goes beyond rote memorization, encouraging you to develop a deep understanding of AWS data engineering concepts and their practical applications. Whether you are an experienced data engineer or new to the field, “Ace the AWS Certified Data Engineer Exam” will equip you with the knowledge and skills needed to excel.

https://youtu.be/2tkHNfxGNGU

Prepare to advance your career, validate your expertise, and become a certified AWS Data Engineer. Embrace the journey of learning, practice consistently, and master the tools and techniques that will set you apart in the rapidly evolving world of cloud data solutions.

Get your copy today and start your journey towards AWS certification success!

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Chapter 2 — Practice Quiz — All Categories

Practice Quiz 1:

A finance company is storing paid invoices in an Amazon S3 bucket. After the invoices are uploaded, an AWS Lambda function uses Amazon Textract to process the PDF data and persist the data to Amazon DynamoDB. Currently, the Lambda execution role has the following S3 permission:

{

“Version”: “2012–10–17”,

“Statement”: [

{

“Sid”: “ExampleStmt”,

“Action”: [“s3:*”],

“Effect”: “Allow”,

“Resource”: [“*”]

}

]

}

The company wants to correct the role permissions specific to Amazon S3 according to security best practices.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

A. Append “s3:GetObject” to the Action. Append the bucket name to the Resource.
B. Modify the Action to be “s3:GetObjectAttributes.” Modify the Resource to be only the bucket name.
C. Append “s3:GetObject” to the Action. Modify the Resource to be only the bucket ARN.
D. Modify the Action to be: “s3:GetObject.” Modify the Resource to be only the bucket ARN.

Practice Quiz 1 — Correct Answer: D.

According to the principle of least privilege, permissions should apply only to what is necessary. The Lambda function needs only the permissions to get the object. Therefore, this solution has the most appropriate modifications.

Learn more about least-privilege permissions.

Practice Quiz 2:

A data engineer is designing an application that will transform data in containers managed by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The containers run on Amazon EC2 nodes. Each containerized application will transform independent datasets and then store the data in a data lake. Data does not need to be shared to other containers. The data engineer must decide where to store data before transformation is complete.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LOWEST latency?

A. Containers should use an ephemeral volume provided by the node’s RAM.
B. Containers should establish a connection to Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) within the application code.
C. Containers should use a PersistentVolume object provided by an NFS storage.
D. Containers should establish a connection to Amazon MemoryDB for Redis within the application code.

Practice Quiz 2 — Correct Answer: A.

Amazon EKS is a container orchestrator that provides Kubernetes as a managed service. Containers run in pods. Pods run on nodes. Nodes can be EC2 instances, or nodes can use AWS Fargate. Ephemeral volumes exist with the pod’s lifecycle. Ephemeral volumes can access drives or memory that is local to the node. The data does not need to be shared, and the node provides storage. Therefore, this solution will have lower latency than storage that is external to the node.

Learn more about Amazon EKS storage.

Learn more about persistent storage for Kubernetes.

Learn more about EC2 instance root device volume.

Learn more about Amazon EKS nodes.

Practice Quiz 3:

A company ingests data into an Amazon S3 data lake from multiple operational sources. The company then ingests the data into Amazon Redshift for a business analysis team to analyze. The business analysis team requires access to only the last 3 months of customer data.

Additionally, once a year, the company runs a detailed analysis of the past year’s data to compare the overall results of the previous 12 months. After the analysis and comparison, the data is no longer accessed. However, the data must be kept after 12 months for compliance reasons.

Which solution will meet these requirements in the MOST cost-effective manner?

A. Ingest 12 months of data into Amazon Redshift. Automate an unload process from Amazon Redshift to Amazon S3 after the data is over 12 months old. Implement a lifecycle policy in Amazon S3 to move the unloaded data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
B. Ingest 3 months of data into Amazon Redshift. Automate an unload process from Amazon Redshift to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after the data is over 3 months old. Use Redshift Spectrum for the yearly analysis to include data up to 12 months old.
C. Ingest 3 months of data into Amazon Redshift. Automate an unload process from Amazon Redshift to Amazon S3 after the data is over 3 months old. Use Amazon Redshift Spectrum for the yearly analysis to include data up to 12 months old. Implement a lifecycle policy in Amazon S3 to move the unloaded data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after the data is over 12 months old.
D. Ingest 3 months of data into Amazon Redshift. Automate an unload process from Amazon Redshift to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after the data is over 3 months old. Use Amazon Redshift Spectrum for the yearly analysis to include data up to 12 months old. Implement a lifecycle policy in Amazon S3 to move the unloaded data to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after the data is over 12 months old.

Practice Quiz 3 — Correct Answer: C.

You can use Redshift Spectrum to access and query S3 data from Amazon Redshift. You do not need to keep data over 3 months old in Amazon Redshift. Instead, you can unload the data to Amazon S3. Then, you can use Redshift Spectrum for the yearly analysis. Additionally, S3 Glacier Deep Archive provides the most cost-effective option for long-term data storage for compliance reasons.

Learn more about Redshift Spectrum.

Learn more about how to manage storage classes in Amazon S3.

Practice Quiz 4:

An ecommerce company is running an application on AWS. The application sources recent data from tables in Amazon Redshift. Data that is older than 1 year is accessible in Amazon S3. Recently, a new report has been written in SQL. The report needs to compare a few columns from the current year sales table with the same columns from tables with sales data from previous years. The report runs slowly, with poor performance and long wait times to get results.

A data engineer must optimize the back-end storage to accelerate the query.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST efficiently?

A. Run a Redshift SQL COPY command and load the data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Redshift before running the report. Configure the report to query the table with the most recent data and the newly loaded tables.
B. Run a SQL JOIN clause by using Amazon Redshift Spectrum to create a new table from the most recent data and the data in the S3 external table. Configure the report to query the newly created table.
C. Run the report SQL statement to gather the data from Amazon S3. Store the result set in an Amazon Redshift materialized view. Configure the report to run SQL REFRESH. Then, query the materialized view.
D. Run the SQL UNLOAD command on the current sales table to a new external table in Amazon S3. Configure the report to use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query the newly created table and the existing tables in Amazon S3.

Practice Quiz 4 — Correct Answer: C.

You can use Redshift materialized views to speed up queries that are predictable and repeated. A solution that runs SQL REFRESH on the materialized view would ensure that the latest data from the current sales table is included in the report.

Learn more about Redshift materialized views.

Practice Quiz 5:

A consultant company uses a cloud-based time-tracking system to track employee work hours. The company has thousands of employees that are globally distributed. The time-tracking system provides a REST API to obtain the records from the previous day in CSV format. The company has a cron on premises that is scheduled to run a Python program each morning at the same time. The program saves the data into an Amazon S3 bucket that serves as a data lake. A data engineer must provide a solution with AWS services that reuses the same Python code and cron configuration.

Which combination of steps will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead? (Select TWO.)

A. Schedule the cron by using AWS CloudShell
B. Run the Python code on AWS Lambda functions
C. Install Python and the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3) on an Amazon EC2 instance to run the code
D. Schedule the cron by using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
E. Run the Python code on AWS Cloud9

Practice Quiz 5 — Correct Answers: B and D.

Lambda provides runtimes for Python that run your code to process events. Your code runs in an environment that includes the SDK for Python to access various AWS services, including S3 buckets.

Learn more about how to build Lambda functions with Python.

EventBridge Scheduler is a serverless scheduler that gives you the ability to create, run, and manage tasks from one centrally managed service.

Learn more about EventBridge Scheduler.

You can also try our GPT at https://chatgpt.com/g/g-1R1mPrhk8-ace-the-data-engineer-associate-certification