AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 523

A company is running a photo hosting service in the us-east-1 Region. The service enables users across multiple countries to upload and view photos. Some photos are heavily viewed for months, and others are viewed for less than a week. The application allows uploads of up to 20 MB for each photo. The service uses the photo metadata to determine which photos to display to each user.
Which solution provides the appropriate user access MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Store the photos in Amazon DynamoDB. Turn on DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache frequently viewed items.
• B. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. Store the photo metadata and its S3 location in DynamoDB.
• C. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Set up an S3 Lifecycle policy to move photos older than 30 days to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Use the object tags to keep track of metadata.
• D. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Glacier storage class. Set up an S3 Lifecycle policy to move photos older than 30 days to the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class. Store the photo metadata and its S3 location in Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES).

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is ideal for data with unpredictable or changing access patterns, automatically shifting photos to infrequent access tiers to save costs without operational overhead. Storing 20 MB files in DynamoDB is highly inefficient and expensive, while Glacier storage classes are designed for archiving and introduce retrieval delays that would break real-time viewing. Using DynamoDB to index lightweight metadata and point to S3 locations ensures high-performance queries at a low cost.