Step 1: Understanding the Problem
The company collectsclickstream datavia Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and stores it inJSON formatin Amazon S3 using Kinesis Data Firehose. They useAmazon Athenato query the data, but they want toreduce Athena costswhile maintaining the same data pipeline.
Since Athena charges based on the amount of data scanned during queries, reducing the data size (by converting JSON to a more efficient format likeApache Parquet) is a key solution to lowering costs.
Step 2: Why Option A is Correct
Option Aprovides a straightforward way to reduce costs withminimal management overhead:
Changing the Firehose output format to Parquet: Parquet is a columnar data format, which is more compact and efficient than JSON for Athena queries. It significantly reduces the amount of data scanned, which in turn reduces Athena query costs.
Custom S3 Object Prefix (YYYYMMDD): Adding a date-based prefix helps in partitioning the data, which further improves query efficiency in Athena by limiting the data scanned to only relevant partitions.
AWS Glue ETL Job for Existing Data: To handle existing data stored in JSON format, a one-time AWS Glue ETL job can combine small JSON files, convert them to Parquet, and apply the YYYYMMDD prefix. This ensures consistency in the S3 bucket structure and allows Athena to efficiently query historical data.
ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION: This command updates Athena's table metadata to reflect the new partitions, ensuring that future queries target only the required data.
Step 3: Why Other Options Are Not Ideal
Option B (Apache Spark on EMR)introduces higher management effort by requiring the setup ofApache Spark jobsand anAmazon EMR cluster. While it achieves the goal of converting JSON to Parquet, it involves running and maintaining an EMR cluster, which adds operational complexity.
Option C (Kinesis and Apache Flink)is a more complex solution involvingApache Flink, which adds a real-time streaming layer to aggregate data. Although Flink is a powerful tool for stream processing, it adds unnecessary overhead in this scenario since the company already uses Kinesis Data Firehose for batch delivery to S3.
Option D (AWS Lambda with Firehose)suggests usingAWS Lambdato convert records in real time. While Lambda can work in some cases, it's generally not the best tool for handling large-scale data transformations like JSON-to-Parquet conversion due to potential scaling and invocation limitations. Additionally, running parallel Glue jobs further complicates the setup.
Step 4: How Option A Minimizes Costs
By usingApache Parquet, Athena queries become more efficient, as Athena will scan significantly less data, directly reducing query costs.
Firehosenatively supports Parquet as an output format, so enabling this conversion in Firehose requires minimal effort. Once set, new data will automatically be stored in Parquet format in S3, without requiring any custom coding or ongoing management.
TheAWS Glue ETL jobfor historical data ensures that existing JSON files are also converted to Parquet format, ensuring consistency across the data stored in S3.
Conclusion:
Option A meets the requirement toreduce Athena costswithout recreating the data pipeline, using Firehose’s native support forApache Parquetand a simple one-timeAWS Glue ETL jobfor existing data. This approach involvesminimal management effortcompared to the other solutions.
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