The correct answer is: Send activity data to an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream and configure it to deliver data into an Amazon S3 bucket for on-demand SQL analytics.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service that reliably ingests streaming data and delivers it to destinations like Amazon S3 with minimal configuration or management. Once the data lands in S3, it can be queried on demand using Amazon Athena, which supports standard SQL queries over S3-stored data. This architecture supports large-scale ingestion, is fault tolerant, and eliminates the need to manage infrastructure manually.

Why the other options are incorrect:

Using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams to deliver data to S3 requires you to manage the data processing and delivery pipeline yourselfsuch as writing a consumer app or Lambda to move data to S3which adds operational complexity compared to Firehose.

Using Kinesis Data Firehose to deliver directly to an Amazon Redshift cluster introduces additional overhead. Redshift requires cluster management, scaling, and maintenance. While Redshift is powerful for analytics, S3 combined with Athena is a simpler and more scalable option for ad hoc queries on large datasets.

Configuring Amazon S3 to invoke a Lambda function on object arrival is useful for light processing or triggers, but Lambda is not designed to handle continuous, high-throughput ingestion of petabyte-scale data efficiently.

Creating a custom ingestion layer on EC2 and writing to Amazon RDS is operationally heavy, not horizontally scalable for massive data volumes, and RDS is not suited for petabyte-scale analytical workloads or SQL over unstructured/semi-structured event data.

Why this question is important: It tests your understanding of scalable data ingestion architectures and your ability to design systems that balance performance, cost, and operational simplicity in AWS for big data and analytics scenarios.

Tip: When the question involves growing data volumes, ad hoc analytics, and SQL over raw data, think Amazon S3 + Athena as a foundational pattern. Kinesis Data Firehose is the easiest ingestion method to pair with this setup.

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