AWS

Your app writes 2 TB/month of logs that are queried heavily for 7 days, rarely after 30, and must be kept 7 years. Which S3 setup is most cost-effective?

S3 storage classes trade cheap storage for slow, sometimes paid retrieval. When you already know how access drops off with age, the cheapest setup is a lifecycle rule that walks the data down the tiers as it ages. A single class overpays, and Intelligent-Tiering solves a problem this question doesn't have.

An application running on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group needs to read objects from an Amazon S3 bucket. The instances are replaced frequently as the group scales. Which approach for granting access requires the LEAST operational overhead?

Anything running on EC2 gets its permissions from an instance profile, not from credentials placed on the instance. The role is attached to the launch template, so every instance the Auto Scaling group creates is already authorised and there is nothing to distribute or rotate.

A content management application runs on Amazon EC2 Linux instances spread across three Availability Zones. All instances must read and write the same set of files using standard file system semantics, and the storage must grow automatically as content is added. Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend?

Multiple Linux instances, multiple Availability Zones, shared file system semantics and automatic growth describe Amazon EFS exactly. EBS attaches to a single Availability Zone, and S3 is object storage without file system semantics.

A company is migrating a Windows application to AWS. The application requires shared storage accessed over the SMB protocol, with Windows NTFS permissions and integration with the company's Active Directory. Which AWS service meets these requirements?

SMB, NTFS permissions and Active Directory together name exactly one AWS service. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is the managed Windows file system, and the other FSx variants and EFS all serve different protocols.