AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 453

A company stores raw collected data in an Amazon S3 bucket. The data is used for several types of analytics on behalf of the company's customers. The type of analytics requested determines the access pattern on the S3 objects.

The company cannot predict or control the access pattern. The company wants to reduce its S3 costs.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use S3 replication to transition infrequently accessed objects to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
• B. Use S3 Lifecycle rules to transition objects from S3 Standard to Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
• C. Use S3 Lifecycle rules to transition objects from S3 Standard to S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• D. Use S3 Inventory to identify and transition objects that have not been accessed from S3 Standard to S3 Intelligent-Tiering

Correct answer: C

Explanation

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed specifically to optimize costs for data with unpredictable or changing access patterns by automatically moving objects between access tiers without performance impact or retrieval fees. Using S3 Lifecycle rules to automate this transition is the most efficient and hands-off approach. Other options like S3 Standard-IA are unsuitable due to potential retrieval fees on unpredictable access, and S3 Inventory adds unnecessary operational complexity.