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SAA-C03 Practice Question 60: EBS Snapshot Archive Tier

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 6 · question 10 of 10

Storage Cost Optimizationeasy

A regulated business must keep one EBS snapshot per volume per month for seven years. Auditors request a restore at most once a year, and they accept that a restore may take up to three days. The snapshots now dominate the storage bill and the finance team wants that reduced.

Which action reduces the cost while still meeting the retention requirement?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Use an Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policy to move each monthly snapshot to the EBS Snapshots Archive tier

EBS Snapshots Archive is the storage tier built for rarely accessed snapshots kept for a long time. AWS puts the saving at up to 75% lower storage cost for snapshots retained 90 days or longer, and the trade-off is exactly the one the auditors have already accepted: an archived snapshot must be restored to the standard tier before it can be used, which is not instantaneous. Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager can apply the archive transition and the seven-year retention on a schedule, so nothing is done by hand.

Option A describes something EBS does not support. There is no mechanism to copy an EBS snapshot into a bucket you own as an object and still restore a volume from it; snapshots live in EBS-managed storage, and the archive tier exists precisely so that you do not need to invent this.

Option B saves money by breaking the requirement. Deleting the monthly snapshots and keeping only quarterly ones leaves gaps in a retention schedule the regulator specified as monthly.

Option D changes the wrapper, not the storage. An AMI is a set of EBS snapshots plus metadata, so the same snapshot data is stored and billed the same way, and if the AMIs stay in the standard tier, there is no saving at all.

Reference: Archive Amazon EBS snapshots

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