Exams / SAA-C03 / S3 upload and transfer performance / Question 2
SAA-C03 practice question: S3 upload and transfer performance (2 of 2)
Design High-Performing Architectures A free question from our original SAA-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.
A media-sharing company collects large video files from customers worldwide into one Amazon S3 bucket in us-east-1, where an event-driven pipeline starts processing each file as soon as it arrives. Customers in Asia and Australia report uploads that run far below their available bandwidth. The bucket name is DNS-compliant and contains no dots. The company wants faster uploads for distant customers without changing the processing pipeline or running new servers. Which solution meets these requirements?
Choose one answer.
- AA. Create buckets in Asia Pacific Regions behind an S3 Multi-Region Access Point, and replicate new objects to the us-east-1 bucket for processing.
- BB. Deploy upload proxy servers on EC2 behind a Network Load Balancer, and put an AWS Global Accelerator accelerator in front of the proxies.
- CC. Turn on S3 Transfer Acceleration for the bucket, and change the upload clients to use the bucket's s3-accelerate endpoint.
- DD. Spread the uploaded objects across many key prefixes in the bucket, so that S3 can scale its request rate for the uploads.
Show the answer and explanation
Answer: C
- A. Wrong: A Multi-Region Access Point sends each upload to the nearest bucket, which does speed up the upload. However, files would arrive in the us-east-1 bucket only after replication, and the extra buckets and replication rules add work. Transfer Acceleration keeps a single bucket. Learn more: Managing multi-Region traffic with Multi-Region Access Points (opens in a new tab)
- B. Wrong: Global Accelerator can carry traffic over the AWS network, but its endpoints are load balancers, EC2 instances and Elastic IP addresses, not S3 buckets. The proxy fleet would be new servers to run and scale, which the company wants to avoid. Learn more: Endpoints for standard accelerators in AWS Global Accelerator (opens in a new tab)
- C. Right: Correct. Transfer Acceleration receives uploads at the nearest CloudFront edge location and carries them to the bucket over an optimised AWS network path. It is designed for customers uploading to a central bucket from far away, needs no new servers, and files still land directly in the us-east-1 bucket. Learn more: Configuring fast, secure file transfers using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration (opens in a new tab)
- D. Wrong: Prefixes raise the number of requests per second S3 can handle (at least 3,500 writes per second per prefix). The problem here is long-distance network throughput for a few large files, not the request rate, so prefixes would not help. Learn more: Best practices design patterns: optimizing Amazon S3 performance (opens in a new tab)
Explanation
Slow uploads from distant customers to one central bucket are the case S3 Transfer Acceleration is built for: uploads enter the AWS network at a nearby edge location. It needs a DNS-compliant bucket name without dots and a change to the client endpoint only. Multi-Region Access Points add buckets and replication delay, a proxy fleet adds servers, and prefixes address request rate, not distance.
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