AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 687

A company has an on-premises data center that is running out of storage capacity. The company wants to migrate its storage infrastructure to AWS while minimizing bandwidth costs. The solution must allow for immediate retrieval of data at no additional cost.

How can these requirements be met?

Answer options

• A. Deploy Amazon S3 Glacier Vault and enable expedited retrieval. Enable provisioned retrieval capacity for the workload.
• B. Deploy AWS Storage Gateway using cached volumes. Use Storage Gateway to store data in Amazon S3 while retaining copies of frequently accessed data subsets locally.
• C. Deploy AWS Storage Gateway using stored volumes to store data locally. Use Storage Gateway to asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of the data to Amazon S3.
• D. Deploy AWS Direct Connect to connect with the on-premises data center. Configure AWS Storage Gateway to store data locally. Use Storage Gateway to asynchronously back up point-in-time snapshots of the data to Amazon S3.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway with cached volumes stores the primary data in Amazon S3 while keeping a cache of frequently accessed data locally, which directly addresses the on-premises capacity shortage and ensures low-latency, no-cost local retrieval. Stored volumes (Options C and D) require storing the entire dataset locally, which does not resolve the local storage capacity constraint. Amazon S3 Glacier Vault (Option A) incurs retrieval costs and does not natively solve the local storage capacity issue with low-latency local access.