DEA-C01 Practice Question 61: Kinesis Retention Reprocessing Window
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) · Test 7 · question 1 of 10
A consumer application reads clickstream events from an Amazon Kinesis data stream that uses the default settings. A bug in the consumer corrupted its output. The team noticed the problem three days later and found that the oldest affected records had already expired from the stream, so they could not be reprocessed. The team wants to have up to five days to fix consumer bugs and replay records in the future, without adding infrastructure. What should they do?
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Answer:
A Kinesis data stream *"stores records from 24 hours by default, up to 8760 hours (365 days)."* The retention period can be raised with the console or the IncreaseStreamRetentionPeriod operation. AWS describes it as *"a safety net to allow more time for your data consumers to recover"* from problems such as *"an issue with your record processing logic."* Setting it to at least five days (for example, 120 hours or more) lets the team replay records after a fix (option B). Additional charges apply for retention above 24 hours.
- A is wrong because adding shards increases throughput capacity. It does not change how long records are kept. - C is wrong because enhanced fan-out gives a consumer dedicated read throughput. Records still expire after the same retention period. - D is wrong because on-demand mode changes how capacity is managed and billed. Retention is configured separately.
Reference: Change the data retention period