FirstTry

Objective 3.5

SAA-C03

Determine high-performing data ingestion and transformation solutions.

Objective 3.5 sits in Design High-Performing Architectures, which carries 24% of the Solutions Architect Associate exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Amazon Web Services (AWS) page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Amazon Web Services (AWS) exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

3-5Design High-Performing Architectures

Producers write 4 MB of records per second into a Kinesis data stream in provisioned mode. What is the smallest shard count that carries it?

One shardThe read ceiling is 2 MB per second per shard, which is a different limit. One shard writes only 1 MB per second.
Two shardsTwo shards accept 2 MB per second of writes and would throttle half the traffic.
Eight shardsEight shards carry the load, and you pay hourly for four shards that no producer is using. Size up when the rate grows or keys are skewed.
Four shardsCorrect · your answerCorrect. Each shard takes 1 MB per second of writes, so four shards cover 4 MB per second.

Correct.

Checked against docs.aws.amazon.com, August 2026

Concept

A stream's capacity is the sum of its shards, and each shard is a fixed unit with separate read and write ceilings. In provisioned mode you own that arithmetic, so sizing starts from the ingest rate divided by what one shard accepts.

Why D

One shard takes 1 MB per second of writes, including the partition keys, so 4 MB per second needs four of them. Anything less throttles producers with ProvisionedThroughputExceeded even though the average looks affordable.

Source

Each shard can support up to 5 transactions per second for reads, up to a maximum total data read rate of 2 MB per second and up to 1,000 records per second for writes, up to a maximum total data write rate of 1 MB per second (including partition keys)…

AWS docs: Amazon Kinesis Data Streams terminology and concepts, checked August 2026
#kinesis#shards#provisioned-mode#throughput

Now you: objective 3.5 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

3-5Design High-Performing Architectures

A consumer is down for three days, and the team wants to replay what it missed from a stream left at default settings. What changes?

Sample question 2 of 3

3-5Design High-Performing Architectures

A team must land clickstream records in S3 with no consumer application to write or operate. A minute of delay is fine. What do they use?

Sample question 3 of 3

3-5Design High-Performing Architectures

A Firehose stream delivers into a Redshift cluster. Where does the data sit before the cluster loads it?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Design High-Performing Architectures