AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 406

A solutions architect is tasked with transferring 750 TB of data from a network-attached file system located at a branch office to Amazon S3 Glacier. The solution must avoid saturating the branch office's low-bandwidth internet connection.
What is the MOST cost-effective solution?

Answer options

• A. Create a site-to-site VPN tunnel to an Amazon S3 bucket and transfer the files directly. Create a bucket policy to enforce a VPC endpoint.
• B. Order 10 AWS Snowball appliances and select an S3 Glacier vault as the destination. Create a bucket policy to enforce a VPC endpoint.
• C. Mount the network-attached file system to Amazon S3 and copy the files directly. Create a lifecycle policy to transition the S3 objects to Amazon S3 Glacier.
• D. Order 10 AWS Snowball appliances and select an Amazon S3 bucket as the destination. Create a lifecycle policy to transition the S3 objects to Amazon S3 Glacier.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Transferring 750 TB of data over a low-bandwidth connection is impractical, making physical migration via AWS Snowball devices the ideal choice. Since Snowball devices cannot import data directly into Amazon S3 Glacier vaults, the data must first be imported into an Amazon S3 bucket and then transitioned to S3 Glacier using an S3 Lifecycle policy. This makes option D the correct and most cost-effective approach.