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CLF-017
Which of the following is the most appropriate primary use case for Amazon S3?
Choices
Explanation and answer
Read the explanation and correct answer (spoiler — try answering first)
Correct answer: C. Store files in an object format.
Explanation
Amazon S3 is an object storage service that can be used to store files such as images, HTML, logs, and backups.
Per-choice explanations
A. Run virtual servers.
Incorrect. Virtual servers are provided by Amazon EC2.
B. Manage a relational database.
Incorrect. Relational databases are provided by Amazon RDS.
C. Store files in an object format.
Correct. Amazon S3 is object storage.
D. Provide DNS name resolution.
Incorrect. DNS is provided by Amazon Route 53.
Practical Use
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a fully managed object storage service that stores files as units called objects. You place objects with a key name into a bucket (the logical container for storage) and read and write them over HTTP and HTTPS. There is no upper limit on storage capacity, and a single object can be up to 5 TB. Durability is designed for eleven nines (99.999999999%) of annual object durability, with data automatically replicated across multiple physical locations. Typical use cases in practice include serving static website assets (images, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML), data lakes (storing source data for analytics such as CSV, JSON, and Parquet), backup and archive (EBS snapshots and RDS snapshots are also stored on S3 internally), log aggregation (the destination for AWS CloudTrail, ALB, and VPC Flow Logs), an origin for Amazon CloudFront, and the location of software distribution packages. You can choose a storage class based on access frequency (Standard, Standard-IA, Intelligent-Tiering, and the Glacier classes), and you can use lifecycle policies to automatically transition data to a lower-cost class for cost optimization. It is important to understand that Amazon S3 is neither block storage (Amazon EBS or Amazon EC2 instance store volumes that the OS sees as a disk) nor file storage (Amazon EFS or NFS mounts), because the use cases are different. On CLF-C02, this content is asked as a question about which of the following is the most appropriate primary use case for S3, or which service is suitable for storing images or backups. Distractors include services whose use case is not storage, such as Amazon EC2 (virtual servers), Amazon Route 53 (DNS), and Amazon RDS (relational database). From SAA-C03 onward, the selection of storage classes, versioning, replication, presigned URLs, the combination of bucket policies and IAM policies, and the distinction among encryption methods (SSE-S3, SSE-KMS, and SSE-C) are asked in depth.