AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design High-Performing ArchitecturesMedium

A startup is building a real-time analytics dashboard that ingests thousands of events per second from various sources. Each event needs to be processed, transformed, and then stored in a data warehouse for immediate visualization. The solution must be highly scalable, durable, and capable of handling fluctuating ingestion rates without data loss.

  1. AIngest events using Amazon SQS queues and process with EC2 instances.
  2. BUse Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest events, followed by AWS Lambda for processing.
  3. CStore events directly into Amazon S3 and then use AWS Glue to process.
  4. DWrite events directly to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: B. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to ingest events, followed by AWS Lambda for processing.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time ingestion of large streams of data records, providing high throughput and durability. Integrating it with AWS Lambda allows for serverless, event-driven processing of each record as it arrives, making it a highly scalable and resilient solution for real-time analytics without managing servers.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. SQS is a message queuing service, not optimized for streaming thousands of events per second in a continuous real-time fashion like Kinesis Data Streams.
  • C. Storing directly to S3 and using Glue is suitable for batch processing, not for real-time ingestion and immediate visualization.
  • D. Writing directly to Redshift for every single incoming event is inefficient, expensive, and can overload the data warehouse, which is optimized for analytical queries, not high-volume transactional writes.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a massively scalable and durable real-time data streaming service that continuously captures gigabytes of data per second from hundreds of thousands of sources.

  • Enables real-time processing of streaming data.
  • Data is available for processing within milliseconds.
  • Highly durable and scalable to handle varying throughput.
  • Integrates with various AWS services like Lambda, S3, and Redshift.

Memory trick: Kinesis for Continuous, Kafka-like Streams.

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