AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 138

A company is building a web-based application running on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. The web application will provide access to a repository of text documents totaling about 900 TB in size. The company anticipates that the web application will experience periods of high demand. A solutions architect must ensure that the storage component for the text documents can scale to meet the demand of the application at all times. The company is concerned about the overall cost of the solution.
Which storage solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• B. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• C. Amazon OpenSearch Service (Amazon Elasticsearch Service)
• D. Amazon S3

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon S3 is the most cost-effective solution for storing large amounts of data, such as the 900 TB of text documents, due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model and ability to scale easily. Other options like Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS are more suitable for smaller, frequently accessed data, and would incur higher costs for this scale of storage. Amazon OpenSearch Service is not designed for this type of data storage and retrieval, making it an unsuitable choice.