AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 611

A company uses an Amazon S3 bucket as its data lake storage platform. The S3 bucket contains a massive amount of data that is accessed randomly by multiple teams and hundreds of applications. The company wants to reduce the S3 storage costs and provide immediate availability for frequently accessed objects.
What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an S3 Lifecycle rule to transition objects to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.
• B. Store objects in Amazon S3 Glacier. Use S3 Select to provide applications with access to the data.
• C. Use data from S3 storage class analysis to create S3 Lifecycle rules to automatically transition objects to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class.
• D. Transition objects to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Create an AWS Lambda function to transition objects to the S3 Standard storage class when they are accessed by an application.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the most operationally efficient choice because it automatically optimizes storage costs by moving data between access tiers based on usage patterns without any retrieval fees or manual intervention. Amazon S3 Glacier does not support immediate retrieval for active applications, making Option B unsuitable. Options C and D introduce higher operational complexity and potential retrieval fees compared to the automated tiering provided by S3 Intelligent-Tiering.