Question

Difficulty: EasyHigh-Performing Data Ingestion and Transformation Solutions

An environmental agency needs to ingest real-time air quality metrics from 10,00010,000 weather monitoring stations across a country. The frequency of data transmissions varies unpredictably based on weather events. The agency requires a serverless ingestion solution that automatically scales to handle traffic spikes and prevents data loss from write throttling, without requiring manual capacity planning or shard provisioning. Which AWS solution meets these requirements?

  1. A
    Amazon Kinesis Data Streams configured in Provisioned capacity mode with a static shard allocation
  2. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams configured in On-Demand capacity modeAnswer
  3. C
    Amazon SQS standard queues to buffer the telemetry data under the assumption that message order is preserved
  4. D
    Amazon DynamoDB configured in Provisioned capacity mode to store raw metrics during peak events

Answer

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams configured in On-Demand capacity mode
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams configured in On-Demand capacity mode is the correct choice because it automatically manages shard provisioning and scales capacity to accommodate the unpredictable, fluctuating data volume. This ensures high performance without manual administration or write throttling.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the workload characteristics and operational constraints.
The workload requires real-time streaming ingestion from 10,00010,000 endpoints with unpredictable traffic fluctuations, zero manual shard management, and no write throttling.
This establishes the requirements for selecting a dynamically scaling real-time ingestion service.
2
Evaluate Kinesis Data Streams capacity modes.
On-Demand mode automatically allocates and scales shards based on data volume, whereas Provisioned mode requires manual scaling and risks throttling during traffic spikes.
On-Demand mode eliminates the operational overhead of shard calculations and manual adjustments.
3
Compare against queue and database alternatives.
SQS standard queues do not guarantee strict ordering, and DynamoDB Provisioned capacity mode does not scale instantly to handle rapid spikes without proactive provisioning.
This confirms that Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand is the optimal, low-overhead solution.

Key Concept

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand capacity mode automatically scales to accommodate unpredictable streaming data ingestion without manual shard management.
Estimated Time:50s
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