AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 672

A company is running a photo hosting service in the us-east-1 Region. The service enables users across multiple countries to upload and view photos. Some photos are heavily viewed for months, and others are viewed for less than a week. The application allows uploads of up to 20 MB for each photo. The service uses the photo metadata to determine which photos to display to each user.

Which solution provides the appropriate user access MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Store the photos in Amazon DynamoDB. Turn on DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache frequently viewed items.
• B. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class. Store the photo metadata and its S3 location in DynamoDB.
• C. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Standard storage class. Set up an S3 Lifecycle policy to move photos older than 30 days to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Use the object tags to keep track of metadata.
• D. Store the photos in the Amazon S3 Glacier storage class. Set up an S3 Lifecycle policy to move photos older than 30 days to the S3 Glacier Deep Archive storage class. Store the photo metadata and its S3 location in Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the most cost-effective storage class for data with unpredictable or changing access patterns, automatically moving objects to infrequent access tiers when they are not accessed. Storing 20 MB photos in Amazon S3 and their metadata in Amazon DynamoDB is a standard, highly performant design pattern. Other options are incorrect because DynamoDB has a maximum item limit of 400 KB, S3 Glacier is designed for archival and has high latency retrieval times, and querying S3 object tags is too slow and inefficient for real-time application metadata lookup.