AWS - Certified Solutions Architect S3 Storage Classes and Policies Questions and Answers 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A financial services company is required to store trade confirmation data for 7 years to meet regulatory requirements. The data is accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely accessed afterwards. However, if access is needed after the initial 30 days, it must be available within minutes. After one year, the data is only accessed for quarterly audits and a retrieval time of up to 12 hours is acceptable. Which S3 Lifecycle policy is the MOST cost-effective solution?
- Transition to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 365 days. (Correct answer)
- Transition to S3 Intelligent-Tiering after 30 days.
- Transition to S3 One Zone-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 365 days.
- Keep the data in S3 Standard for the entire 7-year period.
Correct answer: Transition to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 365 days.
This approach aligns with the access patterns to minimize cost. S3 Standard is suitable for the initial frequent access. S3 Standard-IA is cost-effective for the infrequent access period where quick retrieval is still needed. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is the most cost-effective option for the long-term archival period when retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.
Question 2: A company is launching a new web application that will store user-generated content. The access patterns for this data are unknown and expected to be unpredictable. The company wants to optimize storage costs automatically without impacting performance or availability. Which S3 storage class should be used as the default for new objects?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Standard-IA
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering (Correct answer)
- S3 One Zone-IA
Correct answer: S3 Intelligent-Tiering
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed specifically for data with unknown or changing access patterns. It automatically moves objects between frequent and infrequent access tiers based on usage, optimizing costs without performance impact, operational overhead, or retrieval fees.
Question 3: A research institute needs to store a large, multi-petabyte dataset for long-term archival. The data is rarely, if ever, accessed, but must be retained for 10 years for compliance. In the rare event of a retrieval request, a 24-hour turnaround time is acceptable. Which S3 storage class offers the lowest storage cost for this scenario?
- S3 Standard-IA
- S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive (Correct answer)
Correct answer: S3 Glacier Deep Archive
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage class in AWS and is designed for long-term data archival where data is rarely accessed. It is a perfect fit for this use case, as its standard retrieval time is within 12 hours, which meets the 24-hour requirement.
Question 4: A company stores secondary backup copies of its on-premises data in an S3 bucket. The data is infrequently accessed and can be easily regenerated if lost. To minimize costs, the company is willing to accept lower availability compared to S3 Standard. Which storage class provides the LOWEST cost for this use case?
- S3 Standard
- S3 Standard-IA
- S3 One Zone-IA (Correct answer)
- S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
Correct answer: S3 One Zone-IA
S3 One Zone-IA is designed for infrequently accessed data that is not resilient to the loss of an Availability Zone, such as recreatable data or secondary backup copies. It offers a lower price point than S3 Standard-IA because it stores data in a single AZ. Since the data can be regenerated, the reduced availability is an acceptable trade-off for the cost savings.
Question 5: Which of the following access control mechanisms is primarily used to grant permissions to entire S3 buckets and is the recommended method by AWS for most use cases over legacy options?
- Access Control Lists (ACLs)
- Bucket Policies (Correct answer)
- IAM User Policies
- Service Control Policies (SCPs)
Correct answer: Bucket Policies
Bucket policies are resource-based JSON policies attached to S3 buckets to manage permissions for the bucket and the objects within it. AWS recommends using bucket policies and IAM policies for access control instead of ACLs, which are a legacy mechanism.
Question 6: A media company uses an S3 bucket to store raw video footage. They have a lifecycle policy to transition this footage to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 90 days. An urgent need arises to retrieve a 10 GB file from Glacier that was archived 6 months ago. The file is needed within 5 minutes. Which retrieval option should be used?
- Standard Retrieval
- Bulk Retrieval
- Expedited Retrieval (Correct answer)
- Instant Retrieval
Correct answer: Expedited Retrieval
For S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, Expedited Retrieval is the fastest option, typically making data available within 1-5 minutes for all but the largest archives. Standard retrievals take 3-5 hours, and Bulk retrievals take 5-12 hours. Instant Retrieval is a feature of the S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class, not a retrieval option for Flexible Retrieval.
AWS - Certified Solutions Architect S3 Storage Classes and Policies Questions and Answers 1
A financial services company is required to store trade confirmation data for 7 years to meet regulatory requirements.
The data is accessed frequently for the first 30 days, then rarely accessed afterwards.
However, if access is needed after the initial 30 days, it must be available within minutes.
After one year, the data is only accessed for quarterly audits and a retrieval time of up to 12 hours is acceptable.
Which S3 Lifecycle policy is the MOST cost-effective solution?