AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) — Question 192

A data engineer uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest and process records that contain user behavior data from an application every day.

The data engineer notices that the data stream is experiencing throttling because hot shards receive much more data than other shards in the data stream.

How should the data engineer resolve the throttling issue?

Answer options

• A. Use a random partition key to distribute the ingested records.
• B. Increase the number of shards in the data stream. Distribute the records across the shards.
• C. Limit the number of records that are sent each second by the producer to match the capacity of the stream.
• D. Decrease the size of the records that the producer sends to match the capacity of the stream.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Using a random partition key helps to evenly distribute records among shards, preventing any single shard from becoming a bottleneck, which is why option A is the correct choice. Increasing the number of shards (option B) may help, but without proper distribution, the hot shard issue could persist. Limiting records per second (option C) and reducing record size (option D) do not address the uneven distribution of data across shards.