AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 314

A company stores 200 GB of data each month in Amazon S3. The company needs to perform analytics on this data at the end of each month to determine the number of items sold in each sales region for the previous month.
Which analytics strategy is MOST cost-effective for the company to use?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. Query the data in Amazon ES. Visualize the data by using Kibana.
• B. Create a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Query the data in Amazon S3 by using Amazon Athena. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
• C. Create an Amazon EMR cluster. Query the data by using Amazon EMR, and store the results in Amazon S3. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.
• D. Create an Amazon Redshift cluster. Query the data in Amazon Redshift, and upload the results to Amazon S3. Visualize the data in Amazon QuickSight.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that allows you to analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, meaning you only pay for the queries you run, which is highly cost-effective for occasional monthly analysis on 200 GB of data. In contrast, Amazon ES, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift require provisioning and paying for running cluster instances, making them significantly more expensive for a workload that is executed only once a month.