AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Practice Question

An advertising analytics team stores about 100 TB of clickstream logs in a single Amazon S3 bucket. Analysts query the most recent 30 days of logs frequently, but access to older data is uncommon. Compliance rules mandate that all logs be retained for 2 years. The team wants to minimize storage costs without performing any recurring manual data movements. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Create external tables in Amazon Redshift Spectrum and schedule a script that runs ALTER TABLE UNLOAD commands to move data to S3 Glacier 30 days after ingestion.
Enable an Amazon EFS lifecycle policy to move the objects to the EFS Infrequent Access storage class after 30 days and configure EFS to delete the files after 2 years.
Enable S3 Intelligent-Tiering so that objects are automatically migrated across all storage tiers for the entire 2-year retention period.
Create an S3 Lifecycle rule that stores new objects in S3 Standard, transitions them to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days, transitions them again to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 90 days, and automatically deletes them after 2 years.

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Answer Description

A lifecycle rule automatically transitions objects between successively cheaper S3 storage classes and can also schedule eventual expiration, eliminating manual work. Keeping the first 30 days in S3 Standard preserves performance for frequent queries. Moving the objects to S3 Standard-IA after 30 days cuts cost by roughly 40% while still allowing millisecond access when needed. Transitioning again to S3 Glacier Deep Archive after 90 days reduces cost by up to 95% compared with S3 Standard, which is ideal for data that is rarely retrieved. Finally, automatically expiring the objects after 2 years satisfies the retention policy. The other options are less cost-efficient or do not automate the full lifecycle:

S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds per-object monitoring fees and will not move data to Deep Archive unless the archive tier is explicitly enabled, making it more expensive at this scale.
Amazon EFS Infrequent Access is designed for file systems, not large immutable log archives, and would cost significantly more than S3 archival tiers.
Amazon Redshift Spectrum cannot unload tables directly to Glacier storage classes, so additional manual steps would still be required.

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