AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 530

A company needs to build a reporting solution on AWS. The solution must support SQL queries that data analysts run on the data. The data analysts will run fewer than 10 total queries each day. The company generates 3 GB of new data daily in an on-premises relational database. This data needs to be transferred to AWS to perform reporting tasks.
What should a solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements at the LOWEST cost?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to replicate the data from the on-premises database into Amazon S3. Use Amazon Athena to query the data.
• B. Use an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream to deliver the data into an Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) cluster. Run the queries in Amazon ES.
• C. Export a daily copy of the data from the on-premises database. Use an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway to store and copy the export into Amazon S3. Use an Amazon EMR cluster to query the data.
• D. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to replicate the data from the on-premises database and load it into an Amazon Redshift cluster. Use the Amazon Redshift cluster to query the data.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Using AWS DMS to replicate data to Amazon S3 and querying it with Amazon Athena is the most cost-effective solution because S3 storage is very inexpensive and Athena charges only for the data scanned during the few daily queries. Running dedicated clusters like Amazon Redshift, Amazon EMR, or Amazon Elasticsearch Service would incur significant, continuous hourly costs that are not justified for fewer than 10 queries per day. Therefore, the serverless combination of S3 and Athena minimizes operational and infrastructure costs.