A company needs to store infrequently used data for data archives and long-term backups. Which AWS service or storage class will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Question

Options

• AAmazon FSx for Lustre
• BAmazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• CAmazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• DAmazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval

• A
  6% (1)
• B
  6% (1)
• D
  88% (14)

Explanation

Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is purpose-built for long-term archival storage at very low cost (pennies per GB/month), making it ideal for data that is rarely accessed but must be retained - retrieval times range from minutes to hours, which is acceptable for archive use cases.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A. Amazon FSx for Lustre - a high-performance file system designed for compute-intensive workloads like HPC and ML; expensive and overkill for cold storage
• B. Amazon EBS - block storage attached to EC2 instances, designed for low-latency, frequently accessed data; significantly more expensive per GB and not suited for archival
• C. Amazon EFS - a managed network file system for shared access across EC2 instances; useful for active workloads, but far too costly for infrequent/archival data

Memory tip: Think of Glacier as a "frozen archive vault" - data goes in and sits cold for a long time, just like a physical archive. If the question mentions infrequent, archive, or long-term backup alongside cost-effective, Glacier (or S3 Glacier Deep Archive for even cheaper) is almost always the answer.

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