Which Amazon S3 storage class stores data in a single Availability Zone in exchange for a lower storage price?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. S3 One Zone-IA stores objects in a single Availability Zone, which is why it costs less per GB than S3 Standard-IA. The saving comes with a real risk transfer: if that Availability Zone is lost, the data is lost. AWS positions it for re-creatable data such as secondary backup copies or data replicated from another Region, where the customer can tolerate that exposure.
A. S3 Standard is the default class and stores data redundantly across a minimum of three Availability Zones. It costs more per GB than the infrequent-access and archive classes, but it stores data in several Availability Zones rather than one.
C. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is an archive class that stores data across a minimum of three Availability Zones, with retrieval measured in minutes to hours.
D. S3 Standard-IA stores objects redundantly across a minimum of three Availability Zones. It shares One Zone-IA's infrequent-access pricing shape but not its single-Availability-Zone design.
62
A company must retain compliance archives for seven years. The data is almost never accessed, and when it is, a retrieval time measured in hours is acceptable. Which Amazon S3 storage class gives the lowest storage cost?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is the lowest-cost storage class AWS offers and is designed for data retained for years and accessed once or twice a year at most. Its retrieval options are Standard, which completes within 12 hours, and Bulk, which completes within 48 hours, and it carries a 180-day minimum storage duration charge. When the access pattern genuinely tolerates hours of latency, no other class is cheaper per GB.
B. S3 Standard-IA is priced for data accessed occasionally but needed immediately. For seven-year archives that are effectively never read, it is far more expensive per GB than an archive class.
C. S3 Intelligent-Tiering suits data whose access pattern is unknown or changing. Here the pattern is known and static, so paying the monitoring and automation charge to discover it adds cost without benefit.
D. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is designed for archives that must come back in milliseconds. That capability costs more per GB than Deep Archive, and the requirement here does not need it.
63
How is Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3) volume storage billed?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: B. Amazon EBS bills on provisioned capacity. A 500 GB volume holding 20 GB of data is charged for 500 GB-months regardless of how empty it is, and the charge continues while the volume exists even if the attached instance is stopped. This is why rightsizing and deleting unattached volumes are standard cost-optimization actions, and it is a common source of unexpected charges for customers who assume storage is metered on consumption.
A. For gp3, a baseline of 3,000 IOPS and 125 MiB/s is included in the volume price, and only provisioned performance above that baseline is charged separately. Storage capacity is always charged in addition.
C. Stopping the instance stops the instance charge, not the volume charge. An EBS volume continues to accrue storage charges until it is deleted.
D. Charging on data actually stored describes object storage such as Amazon S3, not block storage. EBS charges for the capacity you reserve.
64
On which dimensions does AWS Lambda charge for function usage?
Easy · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: D. Lambda charges for the number of requests and for compute duration expressed in GB-seconds, which is the memory allocated to the function multiplied by the time it runs. Because no server is provisioned, an idle function costs nothing. AWS also provides a perpetual free allowance of 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month, which makes low-volume event-driven workloads extremely inexpensive.
A. Lambda is serverless. The customer never provisions or pays for instances; AWS manages the underlying compute entirely.
B. Function code is stored by the service and is not billed as a per-GB-month storage line item in the way described.
C. There is no per-function subscription fee. A function that is never invoked generates no duration or request charges.
65
A company moves log files to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access as soon as they are written, then deletes most of them after 10 days. Its S3 bill rises rather than falls. What is the most likely cause?
Intermediate · Choose one
Explanation
Answer: A. S3 Standard-IA carries a 30-day minimum storage duration charge. An object deleted or transitioned before 30 days is still billed as though it had been stored for the full 30 days, so short-lived data placed in an infrequent-access class costs more than leaving it in S3 Standard. Minimum duration charges also apply to S3 One Zone-IA at 30 days, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval at 90 days, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive at 180 days, and they are a leading cause of lifecycle policies that backfire.
B. Request charges do differ by storage class, but for a workload of this shape the dominant and documented effect is the minimum storage duration charge, not the per-request cost of writing.
C. Lifecycle rules work with S3 Standard-IA. Transitioning an object changes its storage class rather than creating a second copy.
D. S3 does not replicate to another Region unless the customer explicitly configures replication. Standard-IA stores objects across at least three Availability Zones within one Region.