AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 658

The chief financial officer (CFO) of an organization has seen a spike in Amazon S3 storage costs over the last few months. A SysOps administrator suspects that these costs are related to storage for older versions of S3 objects from one of its S3 buckets.
What can the administrator do to confirm this suspicion?

Answer options

• A. Enable Amazon S3 inventory and then query the inventory to identify the total storage of previous object versions.
• B. Use object-level cost allocation tags to identify the total storage of previous object versions.
• C. Enable the Amazon S3 analytics feature for the bucket to identify the total storage of previous object versions.
• D. Use Amazon CloudWatch storage metrics for the S3 bucket to identify the total storage of previous object versions.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon CloudWatch provides daily storage metrics for S3 buckets, including specific dimensions for noncurrent object versions (such as StandardStorage and StandardStorage-NoncurrentVersion under BucketSizeBytes), allowing administrators to quickly verify the exact storage consumption of older versions. While S3 Inventory could eventually provide this data, it requires configuring reports and querying them with Athena, whereas CloudWatch storage metrics are enabled by default and provide the quickest way to confirm the suspicion. S3 Analytics and cost allocation tags are not designed to directly measure and break down total storage size by version state in this manner.