AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 643

An application is running on Amazon EC2 instances and storing all application data in Amazon S3. The company wants to archive all files older than 30 days to reduce costs. Archived files are used for auditing purposes only; however, the audit team may need to retrieve files in under a minute.
How should the SysOps administrator implement these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Configure an S3 bucket policy to move all objects older than 30 days to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA).
• B. Create a lifecycle rule to move all objects older than 30 days to S3 Glacier.
• C. Create a lifecycle rule to move all objects older than 30 days to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA).
• D. Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to move files older than 30 days to S3 Glacier Deep Archive.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) is the ideal storage class because it offers rapid, millisecond-level retrieval times, satisfying the requirement to access files in under a minute. Moving objects to S3 Standard-IA as described in Option A meets both the cost-reduction and performance needs of the audit team. Options B and D are incorrect because S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive have retrieval times that typically range from several minutes to hours, which does not consistently guarantee sub-minute access.