An S3 bucket stores application logs. After 30 days, the team rarely accesses the logs, but compliance requires keeping them for 18 months. Which setup most directly reduces storage cost while maintaining compliance?

Enable S3 Versioning and rely on deleting old versions after 30 days to reduce storage costs while keeping the latest data.

Versioning changes how objects are stored but does not inherently implement a deterministic “keep for 18 months” retention rule for all log data. You could still violate compliance if deletes/version retention are not aligned with the required retention window.

Move the bucket to a different AWS region farther from the users to reduce the likelihood of accidental reads and thereby lower storage costs.

S3 storage cost is not reduced by changing the distance to users, and changing regions can affect latency and operational complexity without providing a direct storage-cost reduction for the stated access pattern.

Switch all objects to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval immediately, regardless of object age, to minimize storage charges.

Applying the coldest tier to newly created (recent) logs increases cost if those objects are not actually infrequently accessed for the first 30 days. The scenario indicates the access pattern changes after 30 days.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy to transition objects to a colder storage class after 30 days and expire (delete) them after 18 months. — Use an S3 Lifecycle policy with both a transition and an expiration. The transition after 30 days moves older logs to a lower-cost storage class because the team rarely accesses them then. The expiration at 18 months deletes objects automatically, matching the compliance requirement to retain logs for 18 months. This directly targets the two cost drivers for S3 logs in this scenario: how long objects are stored at each tier and which tier they are stored in over time. S3 Versioning alone does not guarantee a retention period that matches the 18-month compliance requirement. Changing region does not provide a deterministic storage-cost reduction. Moving everything to Glacier immediately ignores the first 30 days access pattern and can increase cost for logs that are not yet candidates for cheaper storage classes.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.