AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 861

A group of research institutions and hospitals are in a partnership to study 2 PBs of genomic data. The institute that owns the data stores it in an Amazon S3 bucket and updates it regularly. The institute would like to give all of the organizations in the partnership read access to the data. All members of the partnership are extremely cost-conscious, and the institute that owns the account with the S3 bucket is concerned about covering the costs for requests and data transfers from Amazon S3.
Which solution allows for secure datasharing without causing the institute that owns the bucket to assume all the costs for S3 requests and data transfers?

Answer options

• A. Ensure that all organizations in the partnership have AWS accounts. In the account with the S3 bucket, create a cross-account role for each account in the partnership that allows read access to the data. Have the organizations assume and use that read role when accessing the data.
• B. Ensure that all organizations in the partnership have AWS accounts. Create a bucket policy on the bucket that owns the data. The policy should allow the accounts in the partnership read access to the bucket. Enable Requester Pays on the bucket. Have the organizations use their AWS credentials when accessing the data.
• C. Ensure that all organizations in the partnership have AWS accounts. Configure buckets in each of the accounts with a bucket policy that allows the institute that owns the data the ability to write to the bucket. Periodically sync the data from the institute's account to the other organizations. Have the organizations use their AWS credentials when accessing the data using their accounts.
• D. Ensure that all organizations in the partnership have AWS accounts. In the account with the S3 bucket, create a cross-account role for each account in the partnership that allows read access to the data. Enable Requester Pays on the bucket. Have the organizations assume and use that read role when accessing the data.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Enabling Requester Pays on the Amazon S3 bucket ensures that the requester's AWS account is billed for the data transfer and request costs. For Requester Pays to function correctly, the requesters must authenticate using their own AWS credentials and access the bucket directly via bucket policy permissions, as opting for cross-account roles (Option D) would attribute the charges back to the role-owning account. Replicating 2 PB of data to multiple partner accounts (Option C) would introduce massive, redundant storage costs.