Question 1hardmultiple choice
Full question →hardmultiple choiceObjective-mapped
A company stores video files in Amazon S3. The files are accessed frequently for the first week, then weekly for the next month, and then rarely after that. The files must be retained for 5 years and any access must be served within minutes. The SysOps administrator needs to minimize storage costs while meeting these requirements. Which lifecycle policy configuration is the most cost-effective?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Good practice is not just finding the correct option. The wrong answers often show the exact trap the exam wants you to fall into.
A
Distractor review
Transition to S3 Standard-IA after 7 days, then to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 30 days.
Glacier Flexible Retrieval has retrieval times of 1-5 minutes typically (expedited) or 3-5 hours (standard). Though expedited can be minutes, it incurs additional cost, and the standard retrieval may exceed the 'within minutes' requirement. Glacier Instant Retrieval is a better and more cost-effective option.
B
Distractor review
Transition to S3 One Zone-IA after 7 days, then to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 30 days.
One Zone-IA does not provide the same durability as Standard-IA and is not recommended for critical data. Glacier Deep Archive has retrieval times of 12 hours or more, which fails the 'within minutes' requirement.
C
Best answer
Transition to S3 Standard-IA after 7 days, then to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 30 days.
Standard-IA provides low-latency access for the weekly access period, and Glacier Instant Retrieval provides the lowest storage cost for long-term, rarely accessed data that still needs millisecond retrieval, meeting the requirements cost-effectively.
D
Distractor review
Transition to S3 Intelligent-Tiering after 7 days.
Intelligent-Tiering automatically moves data between tiers based on access patterns, but it charges a monthly monitoring fee per object that may be cost-prohibitive for many small files. Additionally, it does not transition to the cheapest long-term tier like Glacier Instant Retrieval, so overall costs may be higher.
Common exam trap
Common exam trap: NAT rules depend on direction and matching traffic
NAT is not only about the public address. The inside/outside interface roles and the ACL or rule that matches traffic are just as important.
Technical deep dive
How to think about this question
NAT questions usually test address translation, overload/PAT behaviour, static mappings and whether the right traffic is being translated. Read the interface direction and address terms carefully.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
- PAT allows many inside hosts to share one public address using ports.
- Inside local and inside global describe the private and translated addresses.
- NAT ACLs identify traffic for translation, not always security filtering.
TExam Day Tips
- Identify inside and outside interfaces first.
- Check whether the scenario needs static NAT, dynamic NAT or PAT.
- Do not confuse NAT matching ACLs with normal packet-filtering intent.
Related practice questions
Related SOA-C02 practice-question pages
Use these pages to review the topic behind this question. This is how one missed question becomes focused revision.
More questions from this exam
Keep practising from the same exam bank, or move into a focused topic page if this question exposed a weak area.
Question 1
A company uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver content to a global audience. The origin is an Application Load Balancer in us-east-1. The SysOps administrator wants to reduce costs by minimizing the number of requests that reach the origin server. Which action should the administrator take?
Question 2
A company runs a batch processing application on Amazon EC2 that runs for 2 hours every night. The workload can tolerate interruptions. Which EC2 purchasing option provides the lowest cost for this use case?
Question 3
A SysOps administrator needs to monitor the CPU utilization of an Amazon RDS DB instance and receive an alarm when CPU utilization exceeds 80% for 5 consecutive minutes. Which AWS service should be used to create this alarm?
Question 4
A company runs a critical web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses session stickiness (sticky sessions) to maintain user sessions. The SysOps administrator notices that when instances are replaced during a scale-in or failure event, users lose their session data. The administrator needs to preserve session data across instance failures without losing stickiness benefits. What should the administrator do?
Question 5
A company runs a production web application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application experiences a predictable and steady workload 24/7. The SysOps administrator wants to minimize compute costs for this instance while ensuring it remains available during the expected workload. Which EC2 purchasing option should the administrator use?
Question 6
A company has a VPC with public and private subnets. The private subnets host application servers that need to make outbound HTTPS connections to the internet. The SysOps administrator must implement a solution that provides outbound internet connectivity while preventing inbound connections from the internet. Additionally, the solution must allow the company to control which domains the application servers can access. Which solution should the administrator implement?
FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this SOA-C02 question test?
Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: Transition to S3 Standard-IA after 7 days, then to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval after 30 days. — S3 Standard-IA is designed for infrequently accessed data that needs millisecond retrieval, making it suitable for the weekly access period. After 30 days, data becomes rarely accessed, so S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is ideal because it offers the lowest storage cost for long-lived, rarely accessed data that still requires millisecond retrieval. The transition to Standard-IA at 7 days captures the decreasing access pattern, and then to Glacier Instant Retrieval at 30 days significantly reduces storage cost for the remaining retention period. Glacier Flexible Retrieval has retrieval times of minutes to hours and is not suitable if retrieval within minutes is required; Glacier Deep Archive has retrieval times of hours.
What should I do if I get this SOA-C02 question wrong?
Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.
Discussion
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