SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question

A company is designing a new web application that will serve static content (HTML, CSS, JS, images) to users globally. The application must have low latency and high availability. Content changes infrequently, but when updated, the changes must be reflected immediately. Which solution should the architect recommend?

⚠ Common exam trap

The trap here is that candidates may over-engineer the solution by choosing EC2 or ElastiCache, mistakenly thinking they need compute or caching layers for static content, when S3 + CloudFront is the simplest, most cost-effective, and fully managed solution for global static content delivery.

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

✓

Store content in an S3 bucket and use Amazon CloudFront with S3 as origin

Amazon CloudFront, with an S3 bucket as the origin, provides a global content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations, significantly reducing latency for users worldwide. S3 offers durable, highly available storage, and CloudFront’s cache invalidation or versioned object updates allow changes to be reflected immediately when content is updated. This combination meets the requirements for low latency, high availability, and immediate content refresh.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

✓
Store content in an S3 bucket and use Amazon CloudFront with S3 as origin
Why this is correct
CloudFront caches static assets at edge locations, delivering the low global latency the stem requires, while S3 provides durable, highly available origin storage. Invalidating or versioning objects on update ensures changes appear immediately, satisfying the freshness constraint.
✗
Store content on an EC2 instance behind an Application Load Balancer and use CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
A single EC2 instance behind an ALB provides no global edge caching and creates a compute dependency that undermines high availability for static files. It is tempting because ALB plus CloudFront suits dynamic applications, and would be correct when content is generated per request rather than stored as static objects.
✗
Store content in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis and use CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
ElastiCache for Redis is an in-memory cache, not durable origin storage for HTML, CSS, JS and images, so content could be evicted or lost. It is tempting because pairing it with CloudFront accelerates dynamic and cached responses, and would be correct for session state or database query caching behind a web tier.
✗
Store content in an S3 bucket and use S3 Transfer Acceleration
Why it's wrong here
S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds uploads into a bucket; it does not cache content at edge locations for global viewers, so download latency remains high. It is tempting because it uses S3 and improves transfer performance, and would be correct for accelerating large uploads from geographically distant clients.

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

SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

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