AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 388

A company is building a web-based application running on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. The web application will provide access to a repository of text documents totaling about 900 TB in size. The company anticipates that the web application will experience periods of high demand. A solutions architect must ensure that the storage component for the text documents can scale to meet the demand of the application at all times. The company is concerned about the overall cost of the solution.
Which storage solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• B. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• C. Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES)
• D. Amazon S3

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon S3 is the most cost-effective and highly scalable storage service for hosting 900 TB of unstructured text documents accessible by multiple EC2 instances across different Availability Zones. Amazon EFS and Amazon EBS are significantly more expensive at this scale, and EBS does not natively support multi-AZ shared access for EC2. Amazon ES is an analytics and search engine, making it cost-prohibitive and inefficient for bulk document storage.