AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Cost-Optimized ArchitecturesMedium
A financial services company processes large volumes of sensitive customer data daily. They need a highly available and durable storage solution for this data, with frequent access requirements for the most recent data and decreasing access frequency over time for older data. The company wants to optimize storage costs while maintaining data integrity and compliance. Which AWS storage solution is MOST cost-effective for this scenario?
- AAmazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering with archiving enabled for infrequent access tiers.
- BAmazon EBS gp3 volumes attached to EC2 instances for primary storage.
- CAmazon S3 Standard-IA with a lifecycle policy to transition to Glacier Flexible Retrieval.
- DAmazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive for all data, with a custom retrieval mechanism.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering with archiving enabled for infrequent access tiers.
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between access tiers based on access patterns, optimizing costs without performance impact. Enabling archiving for infrequent access tiers further reduces costs for data that becomes rarely accessed, making it ideal for variable access patterns.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Amazon EBS gp3 volumes are block storage for EC2 instances, not a highly available, durable object storage solution for general purposes like this scenario; it's also generally more expensive for large datasets than S3.
- C. S3 Standard-IA has retrieval fees and is not optimal for frequently changing access patterns as it requires manual lifecycle policy adjustments.
- D. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is for archival data with retrieval times in hours, not suitable for data with frequent access requirements, especially recent data.
Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering
An Amazon S3 storage class that automatically optimizes storage costs for data with unknown or changing access patterns by moving data between frequent, infrequent, and archive access tiers.
- Automatically moves objects between tiers based on access patterns.
- No retrieval fees in frequent or infrequent access tiers.
- Ideal for data with unpredictable access patterns.
- Can enable optional Archive Access and Deep Archive Access tiers for further savings.
Memory trick: Intelligent-Tiering is smart enough to find the cheapest shelf for your data.