Scenarios

Question 1

S3-IAM You have been asked to advise on a scaling concern. The client has an elegant solution that works well. As the information base grows they use CloudFormation to spin up another stack made up of an S3 bucket and supporting compute instances. The trigger for creating a new stack is when the PUT rate approaches 100 PUTs per second. the problem is that as the business grows that a number of buckets is growing into the hundreds and will soon be in the thousands. You have been asked what can be done to reduce the number of buckets without changing the basic architecture.

Answer 1

Change the trigger level to around 3000 as S3 can now accommodate much higher PUT and GET levels.

Question 2

S3-IAM You work for a busy digital marketing company who currently store their data on premise. They are looking to migrate to AWS S3 and to store their data in buckets. Each bucket will be named after their individual customers, followed by a random series of letters and numbers. Once written to S3 the data is rarely changed, as it has already been sent to the end customer for them to use as they see fit. However on some occasions, customers may need certain files updated quickly, and this may be for work that has been done months or even years ago. You would need to be able to access this data immediately to make changes in that case, but you must also keep your storage costs extremely low. The data is not easily reproducible if lost. Which S3 storage class should you choose to minimize costs and to maximize retrieval times?

Answer 2

S3 - IA The need for immediate access is an important requirement along with cost. Glacier has a long recovery time at a low cost or a shorter recovery time at a high cost, and 1Zone-IA has a lower Availability level which means that it may not be available when needed. Further information: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/?nc=sn&loc=3https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-storage-update-new-lower-cost-s3-storage-option-glacier-price-reduction/http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/storage-class-intro.html

Question 3

S3-IAM You work for a major news network in Europe. They have just released a new mobile app that allows users to post their photos of newsworthy events in real time. Your organization expects this app to grow very quickly, essentially doubling its user base each month. The app uses S3 to store the images, and you are expecting sudden and sizable increases in traffic to S3 when a major news event takes place (as users will be uploading large amounts of content.) You need to keep your storage costs to a minimum, and it does not matter if some objects are lost. With these factors in mind, which storage media should you use to keep costs as low as possible?

Answer 3

S3 - One Zone-Infrequent Access The key driver here is cost, so an awareness of cost is necessary to answer this. Full S3 is quite expensive at around $0.023 per GB for the lowest band. S3 standard IA is $0.0125 per GB, S3 One-Zone-IA is $0.01 per GB, and Legacy S3-RRS is around $0.024 per GB for the lowest band. Of the offered solutions SS3 One-Zone-IA is the cheapest suitable option. Glacier cannot be considered as it is not intended for direct access, however it comes in at around $0.004 per GB. Of course you spotted that RRS is being deprecated, and there is no such thing as S3 - Provisioned IOPS. In this case OneZone IA should be fine as users will ‘post’ material but only the organization will access it and only to find relevant material. The question states that there is no concern if some material is lost. Further information: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/https://aws.amazon.com/s3/reduced-redundancy/

Question 4

S3-IAM You work for a health insurance company that amasses a large number of patients’ health records. Each record will be used once when assessing a customer, and will then need to be securely stored for a period of 7 years. In some rare cases, you may need to retrieve this data within 24 hours of a claim being lodged. Given these requirements, which type of AWS storage would deliver the least expensive solution?

Answer 4

Glacier The recovery rate is a key decider. The record shortage must be; safe, durable, low cost, and the recovery can be slow. All features of Glacier. Further information: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/?nc=sn&loc=6https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/storage-class-intro.html

Question 5

S3-IAM You run a meme creation website that stores the original images in S3 and each meme’s metadata in DynamoDB. You need to decide upon a low-cost storage option for the memes, themselves. If a meme object is unavailable or lost, a Lambda function will automatically recreate it using the original file from S3 and the metadata from DynamoDB. Which storage solution should you use to store the non-critical, easily reproducible memes in the most cost-effective way?

Answer 5

S3 - 1Zone-IA

S3 - OneZone-IA is the recommended storage for when you want cheaper storage for infrequently accessed objects. It has the same durability but less availability. There can be cost implications if you use it frequently or use it for short lived storage. Glacier is cheaper, but has a long retrieval time. RRS has effectively been deprecated. It still exists but is not a service that AWS want to sell anymore. Further information: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/?nc=sn&loc=6 https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/storage-class-intro.html