Question

Difficulty: MediumAWS Storage Services

A retail company is migrating its invoice processing system to AWS. The system generates millions of customer invoice PDF documents that must be immediately accessible for the first 30 days. After 30 days, the invoices are rarely accessed but must be stored securely for 7 years to meet regulatory compliance requirements. If access is needed after 30 days, a retrieval time of 3 to 5 hours is acceptable. The company wants to implement a cost-optimized storage strategy.

Which of the following AWS storage solutions should the company use to meet these requirements? (Select TWO.)

  1. Amazon S3 Standard to store the active invoices during the initial 30-day periodAnswer
  2. Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval to archive the invoices for the 7-year retention periodAnswer
  3. C
    Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS volumes to store the active invoices
  4. D
    Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to archive the invoices for the 7-year retention period
  5. E
    Amazon EC2 Instance Store to store the active invoices during the initial 30-day period

Answer

Amazon S3 Standard should be used for the initial 30 days of active storage, and Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval should be used for the 7-year archiving period.
Amazon S3 Standard is selected for the first 30 days because it offers low-latency, high-throughput access to object-based files like PDFs. Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is selected for the remaining 7 years because it provides extremely low-cost archiving for cold data, with standard retrieval options meeting the 3 to 5-hour requirement.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the active storage requirements
The invoices are object files (PDFs) that must be immediately accessible for 30 days, requiring a high-availability, high-durability object storage class like Amazon S3 Standard.
This ensures immediate retrieval and reliable storage for active documents.
2
Analyze the compliance and archival requirements
The invoices must be kept for 7 years for compliance, are rarely accessed, and can tolerate a retrieval time of 3 to 5 hours, matching the capabilities of Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval.
This minimizes storage costs while complying with the regulatory requirements and retrieval window.

Key Concept

AWS storage services selection based on data access patterns, durability, lifecycle, and cost efficiency.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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