AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 527

A solutions architect is designing the cloud architecture for a new application that is being deployed on AWS. The application's users will interactively download and upload files. Files that are more than 90 days old will be accessed less frequently than newer files, but all files need to be instantly available. The solutions architect must ensure that the application can scale to store petabytes of data with maximum durability.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Store the files in Amazon S3 Standard. Create an S3 Lifecycle policy that moves objects that are more than 90 days old to S3 Glacier.
• B. Store the files in Amazon S3 Standard. Create an S3 Lifecycle policy that moves objects that are more than 90 days old to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA).
• C. Store the files in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Schedule snapshots of the volumes. Use the snapshots to archive data that is more than 90 days old.
• D. Store the files in RAID-striped Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Schedule snapshots of the volumes. Use the snapshots to archive data that is more than 90 days old.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon S3 Standard-IA is ideal for data that is accessed less frequently but requires rapid, millisecond-level access when needed, making Option B the correct choice. Option A is incorrect because S3 Glacier does not support instant retrieval without long wait times or high retrieval costs. Options C and D are incorrect because Amazon EBS volumes and snapshots do not scale as seamlessly or cost-effectively to petabytes of highly durable storage compared to Amazon S3.