AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 690

A photo-sharing company makes a personalized collage of each user's photographs available online. The company's custom software builds each collage by using 10-20 available images for each user. The application stores the original images and the collages in Amazon S3 Standard storage. After a collage is created, the original files are needed only if the company must recreate the collage.
The company has thousands of users and wants to reduce storage costs as much as possible. A solutions architect must recommend which S3 storage classes the company should use to store the original images and the collages.
What should the solutions architect recommend to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Move the original images to S3 Glacier. Move the collages to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
• B. Move the original images to S3 Glacier. Move the collages to S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
• C. Move the original images to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA). Move the collages to S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA)
• D. Move the original images to S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA). Move the collages to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)

Correct answer: B

Explanation

S3 Glacier is the most cost-effective tier for the original images because they are rarely accessed and only needed in the rare event of recreating a collage. S3 One Zone-IA is the optimal choice for the collages because it reduces costs compared to S3 Standard-IA, and any data loss from a single Availability Zone failure can easily be mitigated by recreating the collages from the archived originals. Other options are incorrect because they either use more expensive storage tiers for the originals or fail to maximize cost savings for the reproducible collages.