Validate your ability to design and implement data pipelines on AWS. This exam covers data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data store management, operations, monitoring, and data security and governance.
No sign-up — instant feedback after every question
Get instant feedback after each question. See explanations and track your progress as you learn.
Timed session with no feedback until the end. Experience real exam conditions and test your knowledge.
10 questions · pick a topic · 5 minutes · shareable
Every in-scope ingestion, transformation, storage and governance service the DEA-C01 exam actually tests — organised by the four exam domains with decision tables and runbooks
The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) validates your ability to design, build, and maintain data pipelines on AWS. It covers data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data store management, operations, monitoring, and data security and governance. This is one of the newer AWS certifications, launched to meet the growing demand for specialized data engineering skills.
This exam is designed for data engineers with 2-3 years of experience building and managing data pipelines on AWS. You should be comfortable writing SQL and Python/PySpark, working with services like Glue, Kinesis, Redshift, Athena, and S3, and understanding streaming vs. batch architectures. It's also suitable for analytics engineers, ETL developers, and data platform engineers looking to validate their AWS skills.
Read the full AWS Data Engineer Associate certification guide
The DEA-C01 exam consists of 65 questions (50 scored, 15 unscored) in multiple-choice and multiple-response format. You have 130 minutes to complete the exam, and the passing score is 720 out of 1000 (approximately 72%). The exam is available at Pearson VUE testing centers and as an online proctored exam. The cost is $150 USD.
Recommended experience: 2-3 years of data engineering experience with at least 1-2 years of hands-on AWS experience. Familiarity with ETL pipelines, SQL, data lake architectures, and at least one streaming technology (Kinesis or Kafka).
Written in the style of the real exam. Answer each one, then open the answer to check.
Question 1 · Data Ingestion and Transformation
A company streams order events into an Amazon Kinesis Data Streams data stream that has 8 shards. Five separate consumer applications read the stream by using the GetRecords API. Since the fifth application was added, all consumers report increasing read latency and ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors, although the producers are not throttled. A data engineer must give each consumer its own read throughput without increasing the number of shards. Which solution will meet these requirements?
Answer: B
Option B is correct: enhanced fan-out gives each registered consumer a dedicated 2 MB per second of read throughput per shard and pushes records over HTTP/2, so consumers no longer share the per-shard read limit. Option A keeps data available longer but does not add read throughput. Option C reduces the number of write requests but does not change the shared read limit that the five consumers compete for. Option D changes the shard count automatically based on traffic, which the requirement rules out, and consumers that use GetRecords still share each shard's read throughput.
Sources: AWS documentation
Question 2 · Data Store Management
A company stores IoT sensor readings in an Amazon DynamoDB table. Readings older than 90 days must be removed from the table automatically, without consuming the table's write capacity. Each removed reading must be archived to Amazon S3 for long-term analysis. Which combination of steps will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead? (Select TWO.)
Answers: C, E
Options C and E are correct: TTL deletes expired items automatically at no cost and without consuming write throughput, and TTL deletions appear in DynamoDB Streams, where a Lambda function can archive the old item images to S3. Option A consumes read and write capacity for the scans and deletes, and adds code to maintain. Option B manages the export files, but it never removes any items from the table. Option D lowers storage cost for the whole table but does not remove or archive anything.
Sources: AWS documentation 1, AWS documentation 2
Question 3 · Data Operations and Support
Analysts use an Amazon Athena workgroup to power an operations dashboard. The dashboard runs the same set of SQL queries against data in Amazon S3 every few minutes, but the underlying data is refreshed only once each hour. A data engineer must reduce the amount of data that Athena scans without changing the SQL text of the queries. Which solution will meet this requirement?
Answer: C
Option C is correct: with query result reuse, Athena returns the stored result of an identical earlier query that is newer than the maximum age instead of scanning the data again, which suits data that changes only hourly. Option A cancels large queries, which would break the dashboard instead of making its queries cheaper. Option B changes storage cost but not the amount of data each query scans. Option D gives queries dedicated processing capacity priced per DPU-hour, but the queries still scan the same data every time.
Sources: AWS documentation
These sample questions are not part of the DEA-C01 practice exam, so you won't meet them again when you take it.
This practice exam has 65 questions, and exam mode gives you 130 minutes to answer them. The real DEA-C01 exam has 65 questions (50 scored and 15 unscored) in 130 minutes, so a full attempt here is the same length. Practice mode has no timer.
In format, yes: questions are multiple choice (one correct answer) or multiple response (two or more), spread across the 4 exam domains in close to the weights the official exam guide gives them. Scoring differs: AWS reports a scaled score from 100 to 1,000 and you pass at 720, while this practice exam shows the raw percentage you got right. For how hard the exam is, whether it is worth it and how long to study, read our AWS Data Engineer Associate certification guide.
Aim for 80% or more, consistently, on full-length attempts in exam mode, not just once. That leaves a margin over the 720 out of 1,000 you need on the real DEA-C01 exam, whose questions will all be new to you. Repeat attempts here show the same questions, so judge yourself by first attempts and by whether you can explain each answer. No practice score guarantees a pass.
No. The DEA-C01 practice exam is free and needs no account. Your progress and score history are saved in this browser, so they stay on this device and are lost if you clear your browser data.
Start in practice mode, which tells you after each question whether you were right and explains the answer. When you score well there, switch to exam mode: 130 minutes and no feedback until the end, like test day. Your results break the score down by domain, so you can see which domains to study before your next attempt.
Affiliate links — if you enrol through them, CloudNinja may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Studying for more than one certification? All our practice tests are free.