A pipeline generates preview images from master files that are stored elsewhere and backed up. The previews are read rarely, and if they were all lost they could be regenerated by rerunning the pipeline for about an hour. Which storage class is the right economic choice?

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services medium

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The options

Correct S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access

Correct. It gives infrequent-access pricing without paying to keep copies in several Availability Zones — and paying for that redundancy makes little sense for data whose loss costs an hour of compute.

Not correct S3 Standard-Infrequent Access

Wrong as the best answer. Same access profile, but it stores the data redundantly across at least three Availability Zones, so you are buying resilience this particular data does not need.

Not correct S3 Standard

Wrong. Standard's pricing assumes frequent reads. The previews are read rarely, which is precisely the case the infrequent-access classes exist for.

Not correct S3 Glacier Deep Archive

Wrong. The storage is cheaper still, but the previews ARE read, just not often, and hours of retrieval delay for a thumbnail is not a usable product. A minimum storage duration applies too.

Why

Every S3 class is designed for the same extraordinary object durability, but One Zone-IA keeps the data in a single Availability Zone, so losing that zone can lose the data. The rule follows directly: One Zone-IA for data that is reproducible or is a secondary copy of something else, any other class for data that exists nowhere else. Watch the minimum storage durations too — thirty days for the infrequent-access classes, ninety for Glacier Flexible Retrieval, one hundred and eighty for Deep Archive — because deleting early is still charged.

Where this comes from

Cited
AWS exam guide task statement 3.6

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