DEA-C01 Cheat Sheet: Data Engineer Associate Quick Reference

DEA-C01 is a service-selection exam: know which ingestion, storage, and processing tool fits each workload, plus the operational and governance details. Scan this the week before the exam.

Ingestion

• Kinesis Data Streams — real-time streaming, shard-based, replayable; on-demand vs provisioned capacity
• Data Firehose — managed delivery to S3/Redshift/OpenSearch, batch transform, no shard management
• MSK — managed Apache Kafka for existing Kafka workloads; MSK Connect for connectors
• DataSync — bulk/scheduled file migration NFS/SMB→S3/EFS/FSx; DMS — database migration + CDC
• S3 Transfer Acceleration — edge-accelerated uploads; Snowball — offline bulk transfer

Data stores

• S3 data lake + Glue Data Catalog — the center of nearly every architecture
• Redshift — MPP data warehouse for repeated complex SQL; DISTKEY co-locates joins, ALL for small dims
• Athena — serverless SQL on S3; partition + Parquet/ORC cuts cost and time
• DynamoDB — NoSQL key-value at any scale; OpenSearch — log/search analytics
• Lake Formation — permissions layer over the lake (DB/table/column/row)

Transform & process

• Glue — serverless ETL: crawlers (schema→catalog), jobs (Spark/Python shell), DataBrew (visual prep)
• Glue Data Quality — DQDL rules gate pipelines on row counts/nulls/ranges
• EMR — managed Spark/Hive/HBase clusters when you need framework control
• Lambda — lightweight event transforms; Kinesis Data Analytics / Flink — stream processing with SQL

Orchestration & operations

• MWAA — managed Airflow DAGs for interdependent pipelines
• Step Functions — serverless state machines; EventBridge Scheduler — single-target schedules
• Glue workflows/triggers — ETL-native orchestration
• CloudWatch + EventBridge — pipeline monitoring, retries, alerting

Governance & security

• Lake Formation — column/row-level access on catalog tables; tag-based access control
• Macie — automated PII/sensitive-data discovery in S3
• KMS — encrypt at rest; TLS in transit; CloudTrail — audit API access
• Glue Data Catalog — schema registry + versioning; resource policies for cross-account sharing