A company maintains multiple extract, transform, and load (ETL) workflows that ingest data from the company's operational databases into an Amazon S3 based data lake. The ETL workflows use AWS Glue and Amazon EMR to process data.
The company wants to improve the existing architecture to provide automated orchestration and to require minimal manual effort.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Correct Answer:
A
AWS Glue workflows are a feature of AWS Glue that enable you to create and visualize complex ETL pipelines using AWS Glue components, such as crawlers, jobs, triggers, anddevelopment endpoints. AWS Glue workflows provide automated orchestration and require minimal manual effort, as they handle dependency resolution, error handling, state management, and resource allocation for your ETL workflows. You can use AWS Glue workflows to ingest data from your operational databases into your Amazon S3 based data lake, and then use AWS Glue and Amazon EMR to process the data in the data
lake. This solution will meet the requirements with the least operational overhead, as it leverages the serverless and fully managed nature of AWS Glue, and the scalability and flexibility of Amazon EMR12.
The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:
✑ B. AWS Step Functions tasks. AWS Step Functions is a service that lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use AWS Step Functions tasks to invoke AWS Glue and Amazon EMR jobs as part of your ETL workflows, and use AWS Step Functions state machines to define the logic and flow of your workflows. However, this option would require more manual effort than AWS Glue workflows, as you would need to write JSON code to define your state machines, handle errors and retries, and monitor the execution history and status of your workflows3.
✑ C. AWS Lambda functions. AWS Lambda is a service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You can use AWS Lambda functions to trigger AWS Glue and Amazon EMR jobs as part of your ETL workflows, and use AWS Lambda event sources and destinations to orchestrate the flow of your workflows. However, this option would also require more manual effort than AWS Glue workflows, as you would need to write code to implement your business logic, handle errors and retries, and monitor the invocation and execution of your Lambda functions. Moreover, AWS Lambda functions have limitations on the execution time, memory, and concurrency, which may affect the performance and scalability of your ETL workflows.
✑ D. Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) workflows.
Amazon MWAA is a managed service that makes it easy to run open source Apache Airflow on AWS. Apache Airflow is a popular tool for creating and managing complex ETL pipelines using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). You can use Amazon MWAA workflows to orchestrate AWS Glue and Amazon EMR jobs as part of your ETL workflows, and use the Airflow web interface to visualize and monitor your workflows. However, this option would have more operational overhead than AWS Glue workflows, as you would need to set up and configure your Amazon MWAA environment, write Python code to define your DAGs, and manage the dependencies and versions of your Airflow plugins and operators.
References:
✑ 1: AWS Glue Workflows
✑ 2: AWS Glue and Amazon EMR
✑ 3: AWS Step Functions
✑ : AWS Lambda
✑ : Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
A manufacturing company collects sensor data from its factory floor to monitor and enhance operational efficiency. The company uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to publish the data that the sensors collect to a data stream. Then Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose writes the data to an Amazon S3 bucket.
The company needs to display a real-time view of operational efficiency on a large screen in the manufacturing facility.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LOWEST latency?
Correct Answer:
C
This solution will meet the requirements with the lowest latency because it uses Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink to process the sensor data in real time and write it to Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and serverless time series database. Amazon Timestream is optimized for storing and analyzing time series data, such as sensor data, and can handle trillions of events per day with millisecond latency. By using AmazonTimestream as a source, you can create an Amazon QuickSight dashboard that displays a real-time view of operational efficiency on a large screen in the manufacturing facility. Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service that can connect to various data sources, including Amazon Timestream, and provide interactive visualizations and insights123.
The other options are not optimal for the following reasons:
✑ A. Use Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (previously known as Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics) to process the sensor data. Use a connector for Apache Flink to write data to an Amazon Timestream database. Use the Timestream database as a source to create a Grafana dashboard. This option is similar to option C, but it uses Grafana instead of Amazon QuickSight to create the dashboard. Grafana is an open source visualization tool that can also connect to Amazon Timestream, but it requires additional steps to set up and configure, such as deploying a Grafana server on Amazon EC2, installing the Amazon Timestream plugin, and creating an IAM role for Grafana to access Timestream. These steps can increase the latency and complexity of the solution.
✑ B. Configure the S3 bucket to send a notification to an AWS Lambda function when any new object is created. Use the Lambda function to publish the data to Amazon Aurora. Use Aurora as a source to create an Amazon QuickSight dashboard. This option is not suitable for displaying a real-time view of operational efficiency, as it introduces unnecessary delays and costs in the data pipeline. First, the sensor data is written to an S3 bucket by Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, which can have a buffering interval of up to 900 seconds. Then, the S3 bucket sends a notification to a Lambda function, which can incur additional invocation and execution time. Finally, the Lambda function publishes the data to Amazon Aurora, a relational database that is not optimized for time series data and can have higher storage and performance costs than Amazon Timestream .
✑ D. Use AWS Glue bookmarks to read sensor data from the S3 bucket in real time.
Publish the data to an Amazon Timestream database. Use the Timestream database as a source to create a Grafana dashboard. This option is also not suitable for displaying a real-time view of operational efficiency, as it uses AWS Glue bookmarks to read sensor data from the S3 bucket. AWS Glue bookmarks are a feature that helps AWS Glue jobs and crawlers keep track of the data that has already been processed, so that they can resume from where they left off. However, AWS Glue jobs and crawlers are not designed for real-time data processing, as they can have a minimum frequency of 5 minutes and a variable start-up time. Moreover, this option also uses Grafana instead of Amazon QuickSight to create the dashboard, which can increase the latency and complexity of the solution .
References:
✑ 1: Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Flink
✑ 2: Amazon Timestream
✑ 3: Amazon QuickSight
✑ : Analyze data in Amazon Timestream using Grafana
✑ : Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
✑ : Amazon Aurora
✑ : AWS Glue Bookmarks
✑ : AWS Glue Job and Crawler Scheduling
A data engineer must orchestrate a data pipeline that consists of one AWS Lambda function and one AWS Glue job. The solution must integrate with AWS services.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST management overhead?
Correct Answer:
A
AWS Step Functions is a service that allows you to coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows. You can use Step Functions to create state machines that define the sequence and logic of the tasks in your workflow. Step Functions supports various types of tasks, such as Lambda functions, AWS Glue jobs, Amazon EMR clusters, Amazon ECS tasks, etc. You can use Step Functions to monitor and troubleshoot your workflows, as well as to handle errors and retries.
Using an AWS Step Functions workflow that includes a state machine to run the Lambda function and then the AWS Glue job will meet the requirements with the least management overhead, as it leverages the serverless and managed capabilities of Step Functions. You do not need to write any code to orchestrate the tasks in your workflow, as you can use the Step Functions console or the AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) to define and deploy your state machine. You also do not need to provision or manage any servers or clusters, as Step Functions scales automatically based on the demand.
The other options are not as efficient as using an AWS Step Functions workflow. Using an Apache Airflow workflow that is deployed on an Amazon EC2 instance or on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) will require more management overhead, as you will need to provision, configure, and maintain the EC2 instance or the EKS cluster, as well as the Airflow components. You will also need to write and maintain the Airflow DAGs to orchestrate the tasks in your workflow. Using an AWS Glue workflow to run the Lambda function and then the AWS Glue job will not work, as AWS Glue workflows only support AWS Glue jobs and crawlers as tasks, not Lambda functions. References:
✑ AWS Step Functions
✑ AWS Glue
✑ AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide, Chapter 6: Data Integration and Transformation, Section 6.3: AWS Step Functions
A data engineer is building a data pipeline on AWS by using AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs. The data engineer needs to process data from Amazon RDS and MongoDB, perform transformations, and load the transformed data into Amazon Redshift for analytics. The data updates must occur every hour.
Which combination of tasks will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead? (Choose two.)
Correct Answer:
AD
The correct answer is to configure AWS Glue triggers to run the ETL jobs every hour and use AWS Glue connections to establish connectivity between the data sources and Amazon Redshift. AWS Glue triggers are a way to schedule and orchestrate ETL jobs with the least operational overhead. AWS Glue connections are a way to securely connect to data sources and targets using JDBC or MongoDB drivers. AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool that does not support MongoDB as a data source. AWS Lambda functions are a serverless option to schedule and run ETL jobs, but they have a limit of 15 minutes for execution time, which may not be enough for complex transformations. The Redshift Data API is a way to run SQL commands on Amazon Redshift clusters without needing a persistent connection, but it does not support loading data from AWS Glue ETL jobs. References:
✑ AWS Glue triggers
✑ AWS Glue connections
✑ AWS Glue DataBrew
✑ [AWS Lambda functions]
✑ [Redshift Data API]
A company needs to build a data lake in AWS. The company must provide row-level data access and column-level data access to specific teams. The teams will access the data by using Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and Apache Hive from Amazon EMR.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?
Correct Answer:
D
Option D is the best solution to meet the requirements with the least operational overhead because AWS Lake Formation is a fully managed service that simplifies the process of building, securing, and managing data lakes. AWS Lake Formation allows you to define granular data access policies at the row and column level for different users and groups. AWS Lake Formation also integrates with Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and Apache Hive on Amazon EMR, enabling these services to access the data in the data lake through AWS Lake Formation.
Option A is not a good solution because S3 access policies cannot restrict data access by rows and columns. S3 access policies are based on the identity and permissions of the requester, the bucket and object ownership, and the object prefix and tags. S3 access policies cannot enforce fine-grained data access control at the row and column level. Option B is not a good solution because it involves using Apache Ranger and Apache Pig, which are not fully managed services and require additional configuration and maintenance. Apache Ranger is a framework that provides centralized security administration for data stored in Hadoop clusters, such as Amazon EMR. Apache Ranger can enforce row-level and column-level access policies for Apache Hive tables. However, Apache Ranger is not a native AWS service and requires manual installation and configuration on Amazon EMR clusters. Apache Pig is a platform that allows you to analyze large data sets using a high-level scripting language called Pig Latin. Apache Pig can access data stored in Amazon S3 and process it using Apache Hive. However,Apache Pig is not a native AWS service and requires manual installation and configuration on Amazon EMR clusters.
Option C is not a good solution because Amazon Redshift is not a suitable service for data lake storage. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehouse service that allows you to run complex analytical queries using standard SQL. Amazon Redshift can enforce row- level and column-level access policies for different users and groups. However, Amazon Redshift is not designed to store and process large volumes of unstructured or semi- structured data, which are typical characteristics of data lakes. Amazon Redshift is also more expensive and less scalable than Amazon S3 for data lake storage.
References:
✑ AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide
✑ What Is AWS Lake Formation? - AWS Lake Formation
✑ Using AWS Lake Formation with Amazon Athena - AWS Lake Formation
✑ Using AWS Lake Formation with Amazon Redshift Spectrum - AWS Lake Formation
✑ Using AWS Lake Formation with Apache Hive on Amazon EMR - AWS Lake Formation
✑ Using Bucket Policies and User Policies - Amazon Simple Storage Service
✑ Apache Ranger
✑ Apache Pig
✑ What Is Amazon Redshift? - Amazon Redshift
