AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 701

A company is running several large workloads on Amazon EC2 instances. Each EC2 instance has multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes attached to it. Once each day, an AWS Lambda function invokes the creation of EBS volume snapshots. These snapshots accumulate until an administrator manually purges them.
The company must maintain backups for a minimum of 30 days. A solutions architect needs to reduce the costs of this process.
Which solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Search AWS Marketplace. Find a third-party solution to deploy to automatically manage the EBS volume backups.
• B. Create a second Lambda function to move the EBS snapshots that are older than 30 days to Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
• C. Set an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy on the $3 bucket that contains the snapshots. Create a rule with an expiration action to delete EBS snapshots that are older than 30 days.
• D. Migrate the backup functionality to Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM). Create a lifecycle policy for the daily backup of the EBS volumes. Set the retention period for the EBS snapshots to 30 days.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (Amazon DLM) is a native, no-cost AWS tool designed specifically to automate the creation, retention, and deletion of EBS snapshots, making it the most cost-effective and low-overhead solution. Third-party solutions and custom Lambda functions introduce unnecessary licensing, development, or operational costs. Additionally, EBS snapshots are stored in AWS-managed storage rather than user-accessible S3 buckets, meaning standard S3 Lifecycle policies cannot be applied to them directly.