AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 45

A company runs a highly available image-processing application on Amazon EC2 instances in a single VPC. The EC2 instances run inside several subnets across multiple Availability Zones. The EC2 instances do not communicate with each other. However, the EC2 instances download images from Amazon S3 and upload images to Amazon S3 through a single NAT gateway. The company is concerned about data transfer charges.
What is the MOST cost-effective way for the company to avoid Regional data transfer charges?

Answer options

• A. Launch the NAT gateway in each Availability Zone.
• B. Replace the NAT gateway with a NAT instance.
• C. Deploy a gateway VPC endpoint for Amazon S3.
• D. Provision an EC2 Dedicated Host to run the EC2 instances.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because deploying a gateway VPC endpoint for Amazon S3 allows the EC2 instances to communicate with S3 directly without incurring Regional data transfer charges. Options A and B still involve data transfer through a NAT gateway, which does not eliminate charges, and option D does not address the data transfer issue at all.