SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Instance store volumes

  Why it's wrong here

  Instance store volumes are temporary block storage physically attached to an EC2 host; their contents persist only while the instance remains running and are lost on stop, restart, or hardware failure. An internal reporting portal requires durable, shared document storage that survives instance lifecycle events, and instance store provides no native way to serve HTTPS-based web content or manage infrequently accessed objects. Thus it cannot satisfy either the durability or the access requirements of this use case.

• ✗

  S3 Glacier Deep Archive

  Why it's wrong here

  S3 Glacier Deep Archive offers the lowest storage cost, but standard or bulk retrieval times are on the order of 12 to 48 hours, making it inappropriate for a user-facing portal where documents must be returned in milliseconds. Deep Archive is meant for archival data that is rarely touched and can tolerate hours of retrieval delay, not for active infrequent access where immediate first-byte latency is expected. The question specifically calls for immediate access, so this class fails the latency requirement regardless of its cost benefit.

• ✗

  S3 Standard for all objects

  Why it's wrong here

  S3 Standard is optimized for frequently accessed data and has a higher per-Gigabyte storage price than S3 Standard-IA, while offering the same low latency and durability. For a portal whose users are infrequently accessing documents, paying the full Standard rate is cost-inefficient; you could realize the same performance at lower storage cost by using an Infrequent Access class. The appropriate optimization is to match storage cost to the observed access pattern, not to blanket every object into the default class.

• ✓

  S3 Standard-IA or S3 One Zone-IA depending on resilience requirements

  Why this is correct

  S3 Standard-IA is the right baseline for infrequent access because it charges less for storage than S3 Standard while still providing millisecond first-byte latency and multi-AZ durability. If the reporting data can be regenerated or an AZ failure is an acceptable risk, S3 One Zone-IA costs even less by storing copies in a single availability zone, but it sacrifices resilience to AZ destruction. The choice between the two depends on the portal's recovery point objective and whether losing the current copy would be disruptive to the business.

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