AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty — Question 2

A company uses Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service) to store and analyze its website clickstream data. The company ingests 1 TB of data daily using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and stores one day's worth of data in an Amazon ES cluster.
The company has very slow query performance on the Amazon ES index and occasionally sees errors from Kinesis Data Firehose when attempting to write to the index. The Amazon ES cluster has 10 nodes running a single index and 3 dedicated master nodes. Each data node has 1.5 TB of Amazon EBS storage attached and the cluster is configured with 1,000 shards. Occasionally, JVMMemoryPressure errors are found in the cluster logs.
Which solution will improve the performance of Amazon ES?

Answer options

• A. Increase the memory of the Amazon ES master nodes.
• B. Decrease the number of Amazon ES data nodes.
• C. Decrease the number of Amazon ES shards for the index.
• D. Increase the number of Amazon ES shards for the index.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Reducing the number of shards for the index can significantly improve query performance by decreasing the overhead associated with managing numerous shards. The current configuration of 1,000 shards is excessive for the data volume being handled, leading to inefficiencies. Increasing the number of shards (Option D) or adjusting the data nodes (Option B) would not resolve the underlying performance issues, while increasing memory for master nodes (Option A) does not address the data node performance directly.