GCP Professional Data Engineer Practice Question

Standard storage provides the lowest latency and charges no data-retrieval fees, so it is the most cost-effective choice while the videos are downloaded many times per day during the first month. Once access drops to roughly one read per month, Nearline becomes cheaper because its at-rest price is about half that of Standard, and its $0.01/GB retrieval fee is acceptable at that lower access frequency. Configuring an object lifecycle rule to move objects from Standard to Nearline 30 days after creation aligns with Nearline's 30-day minimum-storage requirement and avoids early-deletion charges. A five-year bucket-level retention policy prevents deletion or replacement of the original files, meeting compliance needs. Moving the data to Coldline or Archive after 30 days would reduce storage cost further but their higher retrieval fees and longer minimum-storage periods would exceed the cost of keeping the data in Nearline given the expected monthly access pattern. Placing the data in Nearline from day one would incur substantial retrieval costs during the initial three-week heavy-access window, while leaving everything in Standard would waste storage budget over five years.