SAA-C03 Design Cost-Optimized Architectures Practice Question
A marketing site stores logs in S3. Logs are queried for 30 days, rarely accessed for one year, and then retained for compliance. What should reduce storage cost?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates might choose immediate archiving (Option D) to minimize storage cost, overlooking the 30-day query requirement and the retrieval latency/cost of Glacier Deep Archive, or mistakenly think EBS snapshots (Option C) are a valid alternative for log storage.
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
✓
S3 lifecycle policy that transitions objects to lower-cost storage classes over time
An S3 Lifecycle policy automates the transition of objects from S3 Standard (frequently accessed) to lower-cost storage classes like S3 Standard-IA (infrequent access) after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term compliance retention. This matches the access pattern: frequent queries for 30 days, rare access for a year, then archival storage, minimizing cost without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
S3 lifecycle policy that transitions objects to lower-cost storage classes over time
Why this is correct
An S3 lifecycle policy automates object transitions based on age, aligning storage cost with actual access patterns. Since logs are queried only for 30 days, rules can move older logs to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, then to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval or S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and eventually to S3 Glacier Deep Archive for archival. This approach minimizes storage cost while keeping recent logs immediately accessible, and it requires no manual intervention. Lifecycle rules are evaluated daily per object, making them the ideal cost optimization mechanism for time-decaying log data.
- ✗
Keep all logs in S3 Standard indefinitely
Why it's wrong here
Keeping all logs in S3 Standard indefinitely forces you to pay the highest per-GB storage price even for objects that are rarely or never accessed after the first 30 days. S3 Standard is designed for frequently accessed, low-latency workloads, not for accumulating historical log data that is queried sporadically. Over months or years, the compounding storage costs become far greater than transitioning to lower-cost classes, and there is no retrieval fee savings because Standard incurs no retrieval charges—you simply pay premium storage for no benefit. This approach ignores the predictable pattern that log query frequency decays with age.
- ✗
Use EBS snapshots for the logs
Why it's wrong here
EBS snapshots are block-level backups of Amazon EBS volumes, not a native service for storing or querying individual log objects from S3. To use them, you would first need to copy logs into an EBS volume, then snapshot it, and later restore the entire volume to access any log—making object-level queries impractical and slow. Snapshots are incremental and stored in S3, but they are only accessible through Amazon EC2/EBS APIs, so you cannot use S3 storage classes, lifecycle policies, or object-level methods like Athena or S3 Select. This approach creates unnecessary operational complexity and incurs costs for EBS volume provisioning and snapshot storage, making it a poor fit for application log archival.
- ✗
Move all logs immediately to S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Why it's wrong here
Moving all logs immediately to S3 Glacier Deep Archive saves on storage costs but makes recent logs nearly impossible to query, because retrieval from Deep Archive can take up to 12–48 hours and incurs high per-GB retrieval fees. The site's requirement is to query logs for 30 days, so logs in the query window must be immediately accessible with low latency, which Deep Archive cannot provide. Using Deep Archive from day one would force you to restore lots of data for routine queries, racking up expensive retrieval costs and missing the 30-day query SLA. The correct approach is to let a lifecycle policy transition logs gradually, keeping hot logs in Standard or Standard-IA and moving only older logs to Deep Archive.
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
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every SAA-C03 question from scratch — 935 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.