AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 708

A media company collects and analyzes user activity data on premises. The company wants to migrate this capability to AWS. The user activity data store will continue to grow and will be petabytes in size. The company needs to build a highly available data ingestion solution that facilitates on-demand analytics of existing data and new data with SQL.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Send activity data to an Amazon Kinesis data stream. Configure the stream to deliver the data to an Amazon S3 bucket.
• B. Send activity data to an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream. Configure the stream to deliver the data to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
• C. Place activity data in an Amazon S3 bucket. Configure Amazon S3 to run an AWS Lambda function on the data as the data arrives in the S3 bucket.
• D. Create an ingestion service on Amazon EC2 instances that are spread across multiple Availability Zones. Configure the service to forward data to an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose provides a fully managed, serverless solution to ingest and load streaming data directly into Amazon Redshift, which is optimized for complex SQL analytics on petabyte-scale datasets with minimal administrative effort. Option A requires additional query services or manual stream scaling, while Option C and Option D involve significant operational overhead through managing custom ingestion code on AWS Lambda or provisioning and scaling Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS databases.