SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question

A company uses S3 standard storage for all data. They have data that is accessed rarely but must be retained for 7 years. Which storage class would be MOST cost-effective?

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

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S3 Glacier Deep Archive

S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage for long-term archival. S3 Standard is expensive, S3 IA is for infrequent access but not long-term, and S3 One Zone IA is less durable.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

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S3 One Zone-IA
Why it's wrong here
S3 One Zone-IA stores data redundantly only within a single Availability Zone, so if that AZ experiences a destructive event, all data is permanently lost. It is designed for infrequently accessed but easily recreatable data, not for long-term, durable archival. Because the company must retain data for years with high durability, One Zone-IA's single-AZ design makes it an unsafe choice.
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S3 Standard
Why it's wrong here
S3 Standard is engineered for frequently accessed data with millisecond latency and high throughput, but it costs significantly more per gigabyte per month than archival tiers. For a long-term retention scenario where data is accessed only rarely, keeping everything in S3 Standard would generate prohibitive storage costs over time. It also lacks the cost benefits of automatically transitioning objects to lower-cost classes unless you configure lifecycle rules yourself.
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S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Why this is correct
S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost S3 storage class, offering a storage price of about $0.00099 per GB-month and a standard retrieval time of 12 hours or more. It is explicitly designed for long-term retention of data that is accessed at most once a year, such as regulatory and compliance archives. With a 180-day minimum storage duration and a retrieval fee structure, it perfectly matches the requirement for durable, long-term, low-cost archival.
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S3 Intelligent-Tiering
Why it's wrong here
S3 Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes costs by moving objects between access and archive tiers, but it charges a monthly monitoring and automation fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects. This per-object fee can become significant when you have billions of small archival objects, and the data remains instantly retrievable, which is unnecessary for deep archive use cases. Additionally, it does not offer storage costs as low as Deep Archive for data that remains dormant for years, making it less economical for pure long-term retention.

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

SOA-C02 Cost and Performance Optimization Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison

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