AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 502

A company has multiple AWS accounts with applications deployed in the us-west-2 Region. Application logs are stored within Amazon S3 buckets in each account. The company wants to build a centralized log analysis solution that uses a single S3 bucket. Logs must not leave us-west-2, and the company wants to incur minimal operational overhead.
Which solution meets these requirements and is MOST cost-effective?

Answer options

• A. Create an S3 Lifecycle policy that copies the objects from one of the application S3 buckets to the centralized S3 bucket.
• B. Use S3 Same-Region Replication to replicate logs from the S3 buckets to another S3 bucket in us-west-2. Use this S3 bucket for log analysis.
• C. Write a script that uses the PutObject API operation every day to copy the entire contents of the buckets to another S3 bucket in us-west-2. Use this S3 bucket for log analysis.
• D. Write AWS Lambda functions in these accounts that are triggered every time logs are delivered to the S3 buckets (s3:ObjectCreated:* event). Copy the logs to another S3 bucket in us-west-2. Use this S3 bucket for log analysis.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR) is a fully managed, native feature that replicates objects across buckets in the same AWS Region with minimal latency and zero operational overhead, making Option B the best choice. S3 Lifecycle policies cannot be used to copy objects between buckets, ruling out Option A. While Lambda functions (Option D) and custom scripts (Option C) can copy data, they introduce unnecessary development, maintenance, and execution costs compared to the built-in replication feature.