AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) — Question 53

A company stores petabytes of data in thousands of Amazon S3 buckets in the S3 Standard storage class. The data supports analytics workloads that have unpredictable and variable data access patterns.
The company does not access some data for months. However, the company must be able to retrieve all data within milliseconds. The company needs to optimize S3 storage costs.
Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use S3 Storage Lens standard metrics to determine when to move objects to more cost-optimized storage classes. Create S3 Lifecycle policies for the S3 buckets to move objects to cost-optimized storage classes. Continue to refine the S3 Lifecycle policies in the future to optimize storage costs.
• B. Use S3 Storage Lens activity metrics to identify S3 buckets that the company accesses infrequently. Configure S3 Lifecycle rules to move objects from S3 Standard to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 Glacier storage classes based on the age of the data.
• C. Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Activate the Deep Archive Access tier.
• D. Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering. Use the default access tier.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

The correct answer is D, as S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers based on changing access patterns, ensuring cost optimization with minimal management. Option A requires ongoing refinement of lifecycle policies, leading to higher operational overhead. Option B also necessitates manual rule configuration and monitoring, while C includes the Deep Archive Access tier, which is not suitable for instant data retrieval.