Which fully managed service enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data?

• A. Amazon MSK
• B. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
• C. AWS Glue
• D. Amazon Athena

Answer: (A)

The main idea is a fully managed service that provides Apache Kafka as the underlying streaming platform. Amazon MSK fits this exactly because it runs Apache Kafka for you as a managed service. With MSK, you don’t have to worry about provisioning Kafka brokers, configuring Zookeeper (in older Kafka setups) or handling patching, failover, scaling, or monitoring. AWS handles the operational heavy lifting, while you run your applications that produce and consume streaming data using the familiar Kafka APIs, clients, and ecosystem (Kafka Connect, Kafka Streams, etc.).

This makes it easy to reuse existing Kafka-based applications with minimal changes, and you can still apply Kafka security and VPC controls, encryption, and monitoring through AWS.

The other options don’t provide Apache Kafka as a managed service. Kinesis Data Streams is AWS’s own streaming service with a different API, not Kafka-compatible. AWS Glue is an ETL/service integration tool, and Amazon Athena is a query service for data in S3.