CLF-C02 Practice Question 100: Unpredictable Access Storage
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 10 · question 10 of 10
A media company stores millions of objects, most of them larger than 1 MB, in Amazon S3. Their access patterns are unknown and change over time: an old clip can suddenly become popular for a few weeks and then go quiet again. The company wants storage costs to drop automatically for objects that aren't being accessed, with no retrieval fees when an object becomes popular again, and without analyzing access patterns itself. Which storage class should it use?
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Answer:
S3 Intelligent-Tiering is designed for data with unknown or changing access patterns. For a small monthly monitoring and automation fee per object, it tracks access and moves objects that haven't been accessed to lower-cost tiers automatically: to Infrequent Access after 30 consecutive days and to Archive Instant Access after 90. When an object is accessed again it moves back to the Frequent Access tier, and there are no retrieval fees. Objects smaller than 128 KB aren't monitored and always stay in the Frequent Access tier, which is why the stem notes the object sizes.
Option A is cheaper to store than S3 Standard but charges a per-GB retrieval fee, which the company would pay every time an old clip became popular again. Option B is designed for archives: objects must be restored before they can be read, retrieval takes minutes to hours, and retrieval fees apply. Option C has no retrieval fees but never lowers the price of objects nobody is reading, so the company would pay frequent-access prices for its whole library.
Reference: Understanding and managing Amazon S3 storage classes