AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 467

Your website is serving on-demand training videos to your workforce. Videos are uploaded monthly in high resolution MP4 format. Your workforce is distributed globally often on the move and using company-provided tablets that require the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol to watch a video. Your company has no video transcoding expertise and it required you may need to pay for a consultant.
How do you implement the most cost-efficient architecture without compromising high availability and quality of video delivery?

Answer options

• A. A video transcoding pipeline running on EC2 using SQS to distribute tasks and Auto Scaling to adjust the number of nodes depending on the length of the queue. EBS volumes to host videos and EBS snapshots to incrementally backup original files after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from EC2.
• B. Elastic Transcoder to transcode original high-resolution MP4 videos to HLS. EBS volumes to host videos and EBS snapshots to incrementally backup original files after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from EC2.
• C. Elastic Transcoder to transcode original high-resolution MP4 videos to HLS. S3 to host videos with Lifecycle Management to archive original files to Glacier after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from S3.
• D. A video transcoding pipeline running on EC2 using SQS to distribute tasks and Auto Scaling to adjust the number of nodes depending on the length of the queue. S3 to host videos with Lifecycle Management to archive all files to Glacier after a few days. CloudFront to serve HLS transcoded videos from Glacier.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Elastic Transcoder is a fully managed service that eliminates the need to build a custom transcoding pipeline on EC2, saving development and consulting costs. Using S3 for video hosting combined with CloudFront ensures high availability and low-latency global delivery, while S3 Lifecycle policies to Glacier optimize storage costs for original high-resolution files. Options A and D are incorrect because building a custom EC2/SQS pipeline requires transcoding expertise, and options A and B are inefficient as they rely on EBS volumes instead of highly durable and scalable S3 storage.