AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 260

A solutions architect is designing the data storage and retrieval architecture for a new application that a company will be launching soon. The application is designed to ingest millions of small records per minute from devices all around the world. Each record is less than 4 KB in size and needs to be stored in a durable location where it can be retrieved with low latency. The data is ephemeral and the company is required to store the data for 120 days only, after which the data can be deleted.
The solutions architect calculates that, during the course of a year, the storage requirements would be about 10-15 TB.
Which storage strategy is the MOST cost-effective and meets the design requirements?

Answer options

• A. Design the application to store each incoming record as a single .csv file in an Amazon S3 bucket to allow for indexed retrieval. Configure a lifecycle policy to delete data older than 120 days.
• B. Design the application to store each incoming record in an Amazon DynamoDB table properly configured for the scale. Configure the DynamoDB Time to Live (TTL) feature to delete records older than 120 days.
• C. Design the application to store each incoming record in a single table in an Amazon RDS MySQL database. Run a nightly cron job that executes a query to delete any records older than 120 days.
• D. Design the application to batch incoming records before writing them to an Amazon S3 bucket. Update the metadata for the object to contain the list of records in the batch and use the Amazon S3 metadata search feature to retrieve the data. Configure a lifecycle policy to delete the data after 120 days.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is the most cost-effective solution as Amazon DynamoDB is designed for high write and read throughput, making it suitable for handling millions of small records efficiently. It also provides the TTL feature, which automates the deletion of data after the specified period, thus minimizing operational overhead. The other options, while functional, either involve more complex management (C) or potentially higher costs due to storage and retrieval inefficiencies (A and D).