AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 560

A solutions architect is designing the storage architecture for a new web application used for storing and viewing engineering drawings. All application components will be deployed on the AWS infrastructure.

The application design must support caching to minimize the amount of time that users wait for the engineering drawings to load. The application must be able to store petabytes of data.

Which combination of storage and caching should the solutions architect use?

Answer options

• A. Amazon S3 with Amazon CloudFront
• B. Amazon S3 Glacier with Amazon ElastiCache
• C. Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes with Amazon CloudFront
• D. AWS Storage Gateway with Amazon ElastiCache

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon S3 is an object storage service designed to scale infinitely, making it ideal for storing petabytes of engineering drawings. Pairing Amazon S3 with Amazon CloudFront provides a global content delivery network (CDN) that caches content at edge locations, significantly reducing latency for end-users. Other options like Amazon EBS do not scale to petabytes as easily, Amazon S3 Glacier is meant for archival storage with long retrieval times, and AWS Storage Gateway is intended for hybrid cloud environments rather than web-scale application storage.