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DEA-C01 Practice Question 12: MSK Kafka Migration

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) · Test 2 · question 2 of 10

Data Ingestion and Transformationeasy

A retailer runs a self-managed Apache Kafka cluster on Amazon EC2. Dozens of producer and consumer applications use the standard Kafka client libraries, and several teams run Kafka Connect connectors and Kafka Streams applications against the cluster. The operations team wants to stop patching brokers, replacing failed nodes, and managing the coordination layer. Leadership requires that none of the existing applications need code changes as part of the move.

Which AWS service should the data engineer migrate to?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • D. Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), pointing the existing clients at the new cluster's bootstrap brokers

Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for running Apache Kafka. AWS runs the control plane: it creates the brokers and the ZooKeeper nodes or KRaft controllers, detects failed brokers, and replaces them. You keep using the normal Kafka data-plane operations. MSK "runs open-source versions of Apache Kafka. This means existing applications, tooling, and plugins from partners and the Apache Kafka community are supported without requiring changes to application code." That covers both requirements: no more broker management, and no code changes. The clients only need a new bootstrap broker string.

Option A is a managed streaming service, but it uses a different API. Every producer and consumer would have to be rewritten against the Kinesis APIs or libraries, and Kafka Connect and Kafka Streams applications would not run against it unchanged.

Option B is a delivery service that loads data into destinations such as Amazon S3. It is not a general-purpose log that many consumer groups can read and replay, and it has no Kafka protocol endpoint, so the existing clients could not connect to it.

Option C is a message queue with different semantics: once a message is consumed and deleted it is gone, and it has no partitioned, replayable log. It also requires rewriting every application against the SQS API.

Reference: What is Amazon MSK?

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