AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 796

A company recently migrated its application to AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 Linux instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The application stores data in an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system that uses EFS Standard-Infrequent Access storage. The application indexes the company's files. The index is stored in an Amazon RDS database.

The company needs to optimize storage costs with some application and services changes.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket that uses an Intelligent-Tiering lifecycle policy. Copy all files to the S3 bucket. Update the application to use Amazon S3 API to store and retrieve files.
• B. Deploy Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file shares. Update the application to use CIFS protocol to store and retrieve files.
• C. Deploy Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file system shares. Update the application to use the new mount point to store and retrieve files.
• D. Create an Amazon S3 bucket that uses S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval. Copy all files to the S3 bucket. Update the application to use Amazon S3 API to store and retrieve files as standard retrievals.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon S3 is significantly more cost-effective than Amazon EFS for storing large volumes of file data, and S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes storage costs based on access patterns without performance impact. While Amazon FSx options (B and C) offer shared file storage, they do not match the cost-efficiency of S3 for this use case. Utilizing S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (D) is unsuitable because the latency of standard retrievals (minutes to hours) would break the application's real-time file retrieval requirements.