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Difficulty: MediumManaging Storage and Data Transfer Costs

A digital media publishing company stores and distributes high-resolution article images. The images are stored in an Amazon S3 bucket in the `us-east-1` Region. The company uploads approximately 40 TB40\text{ TB} of new images each month. Users globally download these images, resulting in 150 TB150\text{ TB} of Data Transfer Out (DTO) from S3 directly to the internet, creating high data transfer costs. The images are accessed frequently during the first 3030 days after publication. After 3030 days, the access frequency drops significantly, but users still expect the images to load in milliseconds when requested. After 180180 days, the images are rarely accessed but must be retained for 77 years for compliance. For these archived images, a retrieval time of up to 1212 hours is acceptable. Which two actions should the solutions architect take to meet these requirements most cost-effectively? (Select two.)

  1. Configure an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the images to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) after 3030 days, and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180180 days.Answer
  2. Deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the Amazon S3 bucket configured as the origin to serve the images to global users.Answer
  3. C
    Configure an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the images to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 3030 days, and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180180 days.
  4. D
    Enable Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and configure the application to distribute the accelerated endpoint URL to users for downloading the images.
  5. E
    Create an Amazon S3 Gateway VPC Endpoint in the VPC and update the public route tables to route the external user download traffic to S3 through the endpoint.

Answer

The correct actions are to deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin and to configure an Amazon S3 Lifecycle policy to transition the images to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180 days.
Deploying an Amazon CloudFront distribution is correct because CloudFront's data transfer out rates to the internet are cheaper than S3's rates, and caching at the edge reduces S3 API call costs. Transitioning images to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days is correct because it maintains the required millisecond retrieval time while lowering storage costs, and transitioning to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180 days is correct because it is the most cost-effective tier that meets the 12-hour compliance retrieval requirement.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the image access patterns to determine the appropriate storage tiers.
Images require millisecond access for the first 180 days (frequent for 30 days, then infrequent), and can tolerate up to 12 hours retrieval after 180 days.
This mapping allows transitioning from S3 Standard to S3 Standard-IA at day 30, and then to S3 Glacier Deep Archive at day 180, minimizing storage costs.
2
Analyze the global delivery requirements to optimize data transfer out (DTO) costs.
Global users downloading directly from S3 incurs high standard DTO charges. Caching and serving content via CloudFront reduces S3 requests and utilizes lower CloudFront DTO rates.
CloudFront reduces overall DTO costs and provides caching, which reduces S3 GET request fees.

Key Concept

Cost-effective storage tiering and global content delivery optimization using S3 Lifecycle policies and CloudFront.
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Topics

Managing Storage and Data Transfer Costs