AWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalContinuously Improve Existing SolutionsEasy
A media streaming company has an existing application that uses Amazon S3 for storing video assets. The application occasionally receives spikes in read requests for popular content, leading to performance degradation and increased latency for users. The company wants to improve the user experience by reducing latency for these popular assets, without modifying the existing application's S3 access patterns. Which solution should a solutions architect recommend?
- AImplement S3 Object Lock on the video assets.
- BIncrease the S3 bucket request rate limit by contacting AWS Support.
- CEnable S3 Cross-Region Replication for the bucket.
- DConfigure an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that caches content at edge locations worldwide. By placing CloudFront in front of an S3 bucket, popular content is served from locations closer to users, significantly reducing latency and offloading requests from the S3 bucket during traffic spikes.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. S3 Object Lock is used for data immutability and compliance, not for improving read performance or reducing latency for popular content.
- B. S3 automatically scales to handle very high request rates, and contacting AWS Support for a 'limit increase' for S3 request rates is generally not necessary or how S3 scales for typical use cases. Performance issues are more likely due to geographic distance or architectural choices rather than inherent S3 limits for popular objects.
- C. S3 Cross-Region Replication copies objects to another region for disaster recovery or geographic proximity for different user bases, but it doesn't cache content at edge locations to directly reduce latency for global users accessing popular content.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds.
- Caches content at edge locations worldwide.
- Reduces latency for end-users.
- Offloads origin servers (e.g., S3, EC2).
- Protects against DDoS attacks.
Memory trick: CloudFront is like a 'Fast Lane' for your S3 content, getting it to users quickly.