AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 379

A company provides an online service for posting video content and transcoding it for use by any mobile platform. The application architecture uses Amazon
Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Standard to collect and store the videos so that multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances can access the video content for processing. As the popularity of the service has grown over time, the storage costs have become too expensive.
Which storage solution is MOST cost-effective?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Storage Gateway for files to store and process the video content.
• B. Use AWS Storage Gateway for volumes to store and process the video content.
• C. Use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for storing the video content. Once processing is complete, transfer the files to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
• D. Use Amazon S3 for storing the video content. Move the files temporarily over to an Amazon ElasticBlock Store (Amazon EBS) volume attached to the server for processing.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon S3 provides highly durable and significantly cheaper storage compared to Amazon EFS for storing large volumes of video files. Copying the files temporarily to an Amazon EBS volume attached to the EC2 instances for localized processing is highly cost-effective because EBS is only needed during active transcoding. AWS Storage Gateway options are designed for hybrid cloud integration rather than optimizing this cloud-native workflow, and keeping raw files on EFS or EBS permanently is not cost-optimal.