Design Cost-Optimized Storage Solutions

Exam Guide: Solutions Architect - Associate ⚡ Domain 4: Design Cost-Optimized Architectures 📘 Task Statement 4.1 🎯 Designing Cost-Optimized Storage Solutions is about storing data in the lowest-cost way that still meets business requirements. Start with storage type (object, file, block), then check access frequency, performance needs, retention, backup/archive, and transfer method. You are not just picking “cheap storage.” You are picking the cheapest storage that still works. Knowledge 1 | Access Options Requester Pays Sometimes storage costs are affected by who pays for access. S3 Requester Pays With Requester Pays, the requester pays for request and data transfer charges instead of the bucket owner. Requester Pays is Useful When: You share large datasets publicly or with many external consumers You want to reduce the owner’s cost for downloads or access “Dataset is shared with external users, and owner wants to reduce access cost” → Requester Pays. 2 | AWS Cost Management Service