AWS Certified Data Engineer – AssociateData Ingestion and TransformationMedium

A startup is building a new mobile application and anticipates millions of concurrent players. The application will generate high-volume, low-latency game event data (e.g., player actions, scores, in-game purchases). This data needs to be captured and made available for real-time analytics and subsequent batch processing. The solution must provide strong ordering guarantees for events within a player session and be highly scalable. Which AWS service is best suited for ingesting this raw event data?

  1. AAWS AppSync
  2. BAmazon SQS
  3. CAmazon SNS
  4. DAmazon Kinesis Data Streams
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is designed for real-time ingestion of high-throughput, low-latency streaming data. It provides strong ordering guarantees for records within a shard, making it suitable for maintaining session integrity, and is highly scalable to support millions of concurrent users.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. AWS AppSync is a managed GraphQL service for building flexible APIs, not a data ingestion service for raw event streams.
  • B. Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a message queuing service, not optimized for high-throughput, real-time streaming ingestion with ordering guarantees across a stream for analytics.
  • C. Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) is a pub/sub messaging service primarily for notifications, not for continuous, high-volume data ingestion for analytics.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams for Event Ingestion

A real-time data streaming service capable of ingesting high-volume, low-latency event data from numerous sources, providing ordered and durable storage for subsequent processing.

  • Real-time, high-volume ingestion
  • Low latency and durable storage
  • Ordered records within a shard

Memory trick: Kinesis streams game events in order.

More Data Ingestion and Transformation questions