AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 310

A company has NFS servers in an on-premises data center that need to periodically back up small amounts of data to Amazon S3. Which solution meets these requirements and is MOST cost-effective?

Answer options

• A. Set up AWS Glue to copy the data from the on-premises servers to Amazon S3.
• B. Set up an AWS DataSync agent on the on-premises servers, and sync the data to Amazon S3.
• C. Set up an SFTP sync using AWS Transfer for SFTP to sync data from on-premises to Amazon S3.
• D. Set up an AWS Direct Connect connection between the on-premises data center and a VPC, and copy the data to Amazon S3.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS DataSync is a purpose-built, cost-effective service designed to automate and accelerate data transfers between on-premises NFS/SMB servers and Amazon S3. AWS Glue is an ETL tool not suited for simple backups, while AWS Transfer for SFTP and AWS Direct Connect introduce significant, unnecessary overhead and costs for small, periodic data transfers.