A media company stores large volumes of video assets in Amazon S3. These assets are frequently accessed for a month after upload, then become rarely accessed but must be retained for 7 years for archival purposes. The security team also mandates that all data, regardless of its storage class, must be encrypted at rest. To optimize costs while meeting retention and encryption requirements, which S3 storage class and lifecycle policy combination should be recommended?
- AStore in S3 Standard, then transition to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days, with SSE-S3 enabled for the bucket.
- BStore in S3 Standard-IA, then transition to S3 Glacier after 30 days, with SSE-KMS enabled for the bucket.
- CStore in S3 Standard, then transition to S3 Intelligent-Tiering after 30 days, with SSE-C enabled for the bucket.
- DStore in S3 Standard, then transition to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 30 days, with SSE-S3 enabled for the bucket.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Store in S3 Standard, then transition to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days, with SSE-S3 enabled for the bucket.
S3 Standard is suitable for frequently accessed data for the first month. Transitioning to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days is cost-effective for rarely accessed data that needs to be retained for 7 years, as it's the lowest-cost storage class for long-term archives. SSE-S3 ensures all data is encrypted at rest by default, meeting the encryption requirement without additional key management overhead.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. S3 Standard-IA has a minimum storage duration of 30 days and retrieval fees, which might not be ideal for the first month of frequent access. S3 Glacier is more expensive than Glacier Deep Archive for very long-term, rarely accessed data. SSE-KMS is fine for encryption but SSE-S3 is sufficient given no specific key control requirement.
- C. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is good for unknown or changing access patterns, but for a known pattern (frequent then archival), direct transition to a deep archive class is more cost-effective. SSE-C requires customer-provided keys per request, adding complexity not specified as needed.
- D. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly S3 Glacier) is more expensive than S3 Glacier Deep Archive for the 7-year retention period. While SSE-S3 is appropriate for encryption, the storage class choice is not the most cost-optimized.
S3 Storage Classes for Archival
Amazon S3 offers several storage classes optimized for different access patterns and costs. S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive are designed for long-term, rarely accessed data, with Deep Archive being the most cost-effective for retention periods of 7-10 years or more.
- S3 Standard: high durability, high availability, frequently accessed.
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: archives, retrieval in minutes to hours.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive: lowest cost, retrieval in hours.
- All S3 storage classes support encryption at rest.
Memory trick: For 'deep' savings, 'archive' your data 'after' its active phase.