You want to publish a personal static learning site at low cost. To avoid always-on servers and focus on static file delivery, which configuration is the most appropriate?

Explanation

For a static site, placing content in S3 and serving it through CloudFront is low cost and low operational overhead. It avoids always-on servers.

Per-choice explanations

Practical Use

Hosting content in S3 and serving it through CloudFront is the representative AWS pattern for publishing a static website at low cost. S3 is object storage with low storage unit pricing and suits storing static assets such as HTML, CSS, JS, and images. CloudFront caches and serves content at edge locations around the world, which reduces direct access to the origin (S3) and simultaneously delivers lower latency and lower S3 request costs. Combining Origin Access Control lets you keep the S3 bucket itself private and serve it only through CloudFront. Because this configuration has no always-on servers, the time-based fixed costs of EC2, RDS, and NAT Gateway do not apply. It runs purely on usage (S3 storage and requests, CloudFront data transfer and requests), and during quiet periods it can run for a few hundred to a few thousand yen per month. For HTTPS, a typical setup attaches an ACM certificate (issued in us-east-1) to CloudFront and manages the custom domain through Route 53. Static sites built with SSG frameworks such as Next.js can also be served by this configuration. On SAA-C03, keywords such as "static site," "personal development," "low cost," and "avoid always-on servers" point to S3 + CloudFront. EC2 + RDS + NAT Gateway carries many fixed costs and is excessive for a static site, EKS adds heavy operational overhead, and Redshift + SageMaker targets analytics and machine learning rather than site delivery. Combinations with serverless (Lambda + API Gateway) and configurations that include SPA or SSR are also asked in higher-level exams.