AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 415

A company is using AWS Organizations with two AWS accounts: Logistics and Sales. The Logistics account operates an Amazon Redshift cluster. The Sales account includes Amazon EC2 instances. The Sales account needs to access the Logistics account's Amazon Redshift cluster.
What should a solutions architect recommend to meet this requirement MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Set up VPC sharing with the Logistics account as the owner and the Sales account as the participant to transfer the data.
• B. Create an AWS Lambda function in the Logistics account to transfer data to the Amazon EC2 instances in the Sales account.
• C. Create a snapshot of the Amazon Redshift cluster, and share the snapshot with the Sales account. In the Sales account, restore the cluster by using the snapshot ID that is shared by the Logistics account.
• D. Run COPY commands to load data from Amazon Redshift into Amazon S3 buckets in the Logistics account. Grant permissions to the Sales account to access the S3 buckets of the Logistics account.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Sharing an Amazon Redshift snapshot with another AWS account and restoring it allows the Sales account to access the exact dataset in its own environment with minimal configuration and no ongoing cross-account transfer fees. VPC sharing and Lambda functions do not natively solve the data sharing requirement and add unnecessary complexity. Using COPY commands to export data is technically incorrect (as UNLOAD is used to export to S3) and would incur additional S3 storage and data transfer costs.