DEA-C01 Practice Question 52: MSK Serverless Cluster Type
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) · Test 6 · question 2 of 10
A team wants to run Apache Kafka on AWS for an internal event bus. Traffic is bursty and hard to predict, the team has no Kafka operations experience, and nobody wants to size brokers, rebalance partitions, or plan storage. All client applications authenticate with AWS Identity and Access Management today.
Which option best fits these requirements?
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Answer:
MSK Serverless "is a cluster type for Amazon MSK that makes it possible for you to run Apache Kafka without having to manage and scale cluster capacity. It automatically provisions and scales capacity while managing the partitions in your topic, so you can stream data without thinking about right-sizing or scaling clusters." It bills on throughput, "you pay only for what you use", and the docs recommend it directly: "Consider using a serverless cluster if your applications need on-demand streaming capacity that scales up and down automatically." One constraint that would rule it out elsewhere is satisfied here: "MSK Serverless requires IAM access control for all clusters. Apache Kafka access control lists (ACLs) are not supported", and these clients already use IAM.
Option A keeps every operational burden the team said it cannot carry: broker patching, ZooKeeper or KRaft management, partition rebalancing, storage growth and upgrade planning. An Auto Scaling group does not rebalance Kafka partitions.
Option B is capacity planning by another name, sized for peak. It pays for the burst all the time and still needs a human to expand the cluster when the next, larger burst arrives.
Option C addresses only storage. Storage auto-expansion grows EBS volumes; it does nothing about broker CPU, network throughput, or partition placement, so a bursty workload on the smallest broker type would throttle producers.
Reference: What is MSK Serverless?