AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) — Question 437

An application ingests data from an Amazon Kinesis data stream. The shards in the data stream are set for normal traffic.

During tests for peak traffic, the application ingests data slowly. A developer needs to adjust the data stream to handle the peak traffic.

What should the developer do to meet this requirement MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Install the Kinesis Producer Library (KPL) to ingest data into the data stream.
• B. Switch to on-demand capacity mode for the data stream. Specify a partition key when writing data to the data stream.
• C. Decrease the amount of time that data is kept in the data stream by using the DecreaseStreamRetentionPeriod API operation.
• D. Increase the shard count in the data stream by using the UpdateShardCount API operation.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Increasing the shard count using the UpdateShardCount API operation allows the provisioned mode Kinesis data stream to scale up to handle the peak traffic dynamically and cost-effectively. While switching to on-demand mode (Option B) handles peak traffic, it is generally more expensive than manually scaling provisioned capacity for predictable peak tests. Changing retention periods (Option C) or using KPL (Option A) does not resolve the shard capacity limits causing the slow ingestion.