AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Practice Question

A media company ingests 40 GB of video thumbnails daily into an Amazon S3 bucket. Editors query the data using Amazon Athena for the first 14 days. Afterwards, objects are rarely accessed but must remain immediately available and stored across multiple Availability Zones. After 180 days they must be retained with retrieval times of up to 12 hours. Which S3 lifecycle configuration minimizes cost while meeting these requirements?

Transition objects to S3 One Zone-IA after 14 days and to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 180 days.
Create a lifecycle rule that transitions objects from S3 Standard to S3 Standard-IA after 14 days and to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval after 180 days.
Store all objects in S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval immediately after ingestion and leave them there for the full retention period.
Keep the bucket in the S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class for the entire lifecycle with automatic archive access tiers enabled.

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Answer Description

Keeping the objects in S3 Standard for 14 days avoids retrieval charges while providing low-latency read performance for frequent Athena queries. Transitioning them to S3 Standard-IA after 14 days halves the storage price and still retains synchronous, multi-AZ access, with a small per-GB retrieval fee that matches the "rarely accessed" pattern. Moving the data again at day 180 to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval cuts long-term storage cost; its Bulk retrieval tier returns objects within 5-12 hours, satisfying the 12-hour requirement.

Intelligent-Tiering adds a per-object monitoring fee and does not transition data to an archive tier until it is at least 90 days old, so it yields higher total cost over the first three months. One Zone-IA stores data in a single Availability Zone, violating the multi-AZ durability requirement, and Glacier Deep Archive can take up to 48 hours to complete a bulk restore. Placing the objects directly into Glacier Instant Retrieval would reduce storage cost, but every Athena scan during the initial 14-day analysis window would incur a $0.03/GB retrieval charge, making it more expensive overall.

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