SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a multi-account AWS environment with a central logging account. All VPC Flow Logs are published to a central S3 bucket in the logging account. The security team needs to analyze these logs using Amazon Athena, but they want to minimize costs by reducing the amount of data scanned. Which partitioning strategy is MOST effective?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers choose region-based partitioning (Option A or C) thinking it's important for geographic filtering, but in a multi-account logging scenario, account-level filtering is more frequent and cost-effective than region-level partitioning.
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
✓
Partition by date and account ID.
Partitioning by date and account ID is most effective because the security team's queries will typically filter by time range and specific accounts. This minimizes data scanned by Athena, which charges per query based on the amount of data read. Partitioning by date first leverages natural time-based access patterns, while account ID further narrows scans when investigating incidents in specific accounts.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Partition by region and date.
Why it's wrong here
Without account partition, queries for a specific account will scan all accounts in that region.
- ✗
Partition by account ID only.
Why it's wrong here
Without date partition, scanning all dates for an account is costly.
- ✗
Partition by account ID and region.
Why it's wrong here
Missing date partition; most queries will filter by date.
- ✓
Partition by date and account ID.
Why this is correct
Common queries filter by date range and account, so this minimizes scanned data.
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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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.