AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 790

A company uses an Amazon S3 bucket as its data lake storage platform. The S3 bucket contains a massive amount of data that is accessed randomly by multiple teams and hundreds of applications. The company wants to reduce the S3 storage costs and provide immediate availability for frequently accessed objects.

What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an S3 Lifecycle rule to transition objects to the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class.
• B. Store objects in Amazon S3 Glacier. Use S3 Select to provide applications with access to the data.
• C. Use data from S3 storage class analysis to create S3 Lifecycle rules to automatically transition objects to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class.
• D. Transition objects to the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) storage class. Create an AWS Lambda function to transition objects to the S3 Standard storage class when they are accessed by an application.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the most operationally efficient choice because it automatically shifts objects between access tiers based on changing access patterns without retrieval fees or operational overhead, ensuring immediate availability for active data. S3 Glacier does not support immediate retrieval for random real-time queries, making option B incorrect. Options C and D introduce unnecessary administrative complexity and retrieval costs for unpredictable access patterns compared to the automated nature of S3 Intelligent-Tiering.