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SAA-C03 Practice Question 7: S3 Transfer Acceleration Uploads

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 1 · question 7 of 10

Data Transfer Performancemedium

Researchers in Australia, Japan, and Brazil each upload instrument files of 5 GB to 20 GB several times a day to a single S3 bucket in us-east-1. Uploads routinely take hours and sometimes fail outright, even though each site has plenty of spare internet bandwidth.

The upload client is a vendor binary that speaks the S3 API and whose only configurable setting is the endpoint hostname. The solution must not add buckets or Regional infrastructure. What should the architect do?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • C. Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the bucket and point the client at the bucket's s3-accelerate endpoint

S3 Transfer Acceleration is a bucket-level feature built exactly for this shape of problem: customers uploading to one centralized bucket from all over the world, transferring gigabytes to terabytes across continents, and unable to saturate their available bandwidth over the open internet. Data enters the nearest CloudFront edge location and is then carried to the bucket over an optimized AWS network path. Turning it on is a bucket setting plus a hostname change to bucket-name.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com, which is the one thing this vendor client can be configured with. Note the two requirements the stem quietly satisfies: the bucket name must be DNS-compliant with no periods, and us-east-1 is a supported Region.

Option A misapplies CloudFront. CloudFront's caching accelerates *reads* by serving repeated responses from the edge; a 20 GB upload is a single unique PUT with nothing to cache, so edge caching contributes nothing to it. Transfer Acceleration is the feature that borrows CloudFront's edge network for the upload direction.

Option B is explicitly excluded by the "no additional buckets or Regional infrastructure" constraint, and it is also worse on the merits: replication is asynchronous, so consolidated objects arrive with a delay, and you pay to store and transfer every file twice.

Option D would give dedicated bandwidth, but Direct Connect involves physical circuits at three sites with lead times measured in weeks or months and substantial recurring cost. The stem says the sites already have spare bandwidth; the bottleneck is long-haul internet path quality, not capacity, so buying more capacity does not fix it.

Reference: Configuring fast, secure file transfers using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

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