You are a solutions architect working for a media company that produces and stores image and video content that is sold as stock content to other companies that wish to use your stock content in their web and mobile apps. You are storing your stock content in S3 and you need to optimize for cost. Some of your images are small, less than 128 KB in size. However, most of your stock content is much larger. The amount of content you manage is very large, with over 1 million objects in S3. These objects have varying access patterns. Some are accessed frequently, while others are accessed very infrequently. Also, the access patterns for the stock objects change over time.
Which S3 storage class should you choose for your stock content to optimize your costs while also providing the best overall performance?

Answer options:

A.S3 Standard
B.S3 Standard-IA
C.S3 Intelligent-Tiering
D.S3 One Zone-IA

Correct Answer: C
Option A is incorrect. S3 Standard tiering is not a cost-optimized solution. You have a lot of objects and many of them are accessed very infrequently. With S3 Standard, all objects are charged at the same rate, regardless of how often they are accessed.
Option B is incorrect. S3 Standard-IA, or Infrequent Access, would be a cost-optimized solution for less frequently accessed objects. However, retrieval latency will not be optimal for frequently accessed objects.
Option C is correct. S3 Intelligent-Tiering gives you the ability to have S3 monitor the access patterns of your objects and move objects across the various storage tiers based on the relevant access patterns. This will give you both cost and performance optimization. Also, smaller files (less than 128 KB) can be stored in S3 Intelligent-Tiering but they will always remain in the S3 Standard storage class.
Option D is incorrect. S3 One Zone-IA is used for files that are easily recreated if the one AZ becomes unavailable. Also, an infrequent access tier such as S3 One Zone-IA would be a cost-optimized solution for less frequently accessed objects. However, retrieval latency will not be optimal for frequently accessed objects.
Reference:
Please see the Amazon Simple Storage Service user guide titled Using Amazon S3 storage classes (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/storage-class-intro.html)