DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A company uses Amazon CloudFront to distribute content from an S3 bucket. The content is static and rarely changes. The developer wants to reduce the load on the origin and improve performance for users. Which configuration change would achieve this?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse decreasing TTL with improving freshness, but for static, rarely changing content, a longer TTL reduces origin load and improves performance, not a shorter one.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Increase the TTL (Time to Live) for the cache behavior.
Increasing the TTL for the cache behavior tells CloudFront edge locations to retain cached copies of the static content for a longer period before re-validating with the origin S3 bucket. This reduces the number of requests that reach the origin, lowering load on the S3 bucket, and improves user performance by serving content directly from the edge cache more frequently.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Disable caching for the distribution.
Why it's wrong here
Disabling caching for a CloudFront distribution forces every single request for content to be forwarded directly to the origin server. This completely bypasses CloudFront's primary function of serving content from its global edge caches, resulting in the maximum possible load on the origin as it must process every request without any offloading.
- ✗
Enable Lambda@Edge to process requests at edge locations.
Why it's wrong here
Enabling Lambda@Edge allows custom code execution at CloudFront edge locations for tasks like request modification, authentication, or dynamic content generation. However, it primarily adds processing logic at the edge and does not inherently reduce the number of requests that ultimately need to be served or validated by the origin server for the actual content.
- ✗
Decrease the TTL (Time to Live) for the cache behavior.
Why it's wrong here
Decreasing the TTL (Time to Live) for a cache behavior instructs CloudFront to store objects in its edge caches for a shorter duration. Once an object's reduced TTL expires, CloudFront must forward subsequent requests for that object to the origin server to revalidate or fetch a fresh copy, thereby increasing the frequency of origin requests and the load on the origin.
- ✓
Increase the TTL (Time to Live) for the cache behavior.
Why this is correct
Increasing the TTL (Time to Live) for a cache behavior allows CloudFront to serve objects directly from its edge caches for a longer period before needing to revalidate or fetch them from the origin. This significantly improves the cache hit ratio, meaning more requests are served directly from the edge, which drastically reduces the number of requests reaching the origin server and lowers its operational load.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DVA-C02 exam.