AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 274

A company has an application that uses Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to store data. The files are 1 GB in size or larger and are accessed often only for the first few days after creation. The application data is shared across a cluster of Linux servers. The company wants to reduce storage costs tor the application.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Implement Amazon FSx and mount the network drive on each server.
• B. Move the files from Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) and store them locally on each Amazon EC2 instance.
• C. Configure a Lifecycle policy to move the files to the EFS Infrequent Access (IA) storage class after 7 days.
• D. Move the files to Amazon S3 with S3 lifecycle policies enabled. Rewrite the application to support mounting the S3 bucket.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Configuring an EFS Lifecycle policy to move files to the Infrequent Access (IA) storage class is the most cost-effective and operationally efficient solution because it automatically reduces storage costs for older, rarely accessed files without changing the application architecture. Storing files locally on EC2 instances (Option B) breaks the shared storage requirement for the Linux cluster. Rewriting the application for Amazon S3 (Option D) and migrating to Amazon FSx (Option A) introduce unnecessary complexity and administrative overhead compared to native EFS lifecycle management.