Question #1744
A company stores approximately 400 TB of data in Amazon S3 Standard storage monthly. The S3 objects average 75 GB in size and are regularly overwritten using multipart uploads by their worldwide application. While the total number and size of objects remain consistent, the company observes a steady monthly rise in S3 storage costs.
What should a solutions architect recommend to address the cost increase?
Replace multipart uploads with AWS Snowball for data transfers.
Implement an S3 Lifecycle policy to expire incomplete multipart uploads.
Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering to automatically optimize storage costs.
Set up S3 Cross-Region Replication to reduce regional storage overhead.
Explanation
The correct answer is B.
Why B is correct:
Multipart uploads create temporary parts stored in S3 until the upload completes or is aborted. If incomplete uploads are not cleaned up, these parts accumulate over time, increasing storage costs. An S3 Lifecycle policy can automatically delete incomplete multipart uploads after a specified period (e.g., 7 days), addressing the root cause of the cost increase.
Why other options are incorrect:
- A: AWS Snowball is designed for large-scale data transfers into AWS, not for regular overwrites. Replacing multipart uploads with Snowball would not resolve the issue of incomplete uploads.
- C: S3 Intelligent-Tiering optimizes costs based on access patterns but does not address incomplete multipart uploads. The problem here is storage bloat from orphaned parts, not access frequency.
- D: S3 Cross-Region Replication duplicates data across regions, increasing storage costs rather than reducing them.
Key Points:
- Incomplete multipart uploads consume storage until explicitly aborted or expired.
- S3 Lifecycle policies can automate cleanup of incomplete uploads.
- Overwritten objects via multipart uploads may leave residual parts if not managed.
Answer
The correct answer is: B