AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 607

A company runs several websites on AWS for its different brands. Each website generates tens of gigabytes of web traffic logs each day. A solutions architect needs to design a scalable solution to give the company's developers the ability to analyze traffic patterns across all the company's websites. This analysis by the developers will occur on demand once a week over the course of several months. The solution must support queries with standard SQL.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Store the logs in Amazon S3. Use Amazon Athena tor analysis.
• B. Store the logs in Amazon RDS. Use a database client for analysis.
• C. Store the logs in Amazon OpenSearch Service. Use OpenSearch Service for analysis.
• D. Store the logs in an Amazon EMR cluster Use a supported open-source framework for SQL-based analysis.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Storing logs in Amazon S3 combined with Amazon Athena is the most cost-effective solution because S3 offers highly durable, low-cost storage, and Athena charges only for the data scanned during the weekly, on-demand SQL queries. Other options like Amazon RDS, Amazon OpenSearch Service, or Amazon EMR require running provisioned infrastructure continuously or spinning up expensive clusters, which significantly increases costs for infrequent, weekly analysis.