A media company has users worldwide uploading large video files directly to a single S3 bucket in one AWS Region, and users far from that Region report slow, inconsistent upload speeds over the public internet. Which S3 feature is designed to speed up these long-distance uploads by routing traffic through the nearest edge location onto AWS's network backbone?
- S3 Same-Region Replication
- S3 Intelligent-Tiering
- S3 Transfer Acceleration, using the bucket's accelerate endpoint which routes traffic through Amazon CloudFront edge locations
- S3 Object Lock in Compliance mode
Why C? And why not the others?
Correct answer: C. S3 Transfer Acceleration, using the bucket's accelerate endpoint which routes traffic through Amazon CloudFront edge locations
S3 Transfer Acceleration takes advantage of the globally distributed edge locations that make up the Amazon CloudFront network: data uploaded to the accelerate endpoint enters the AWS network at the nearest edge location and travels the rest of the way to the bucket's Region over Amazon's optimized backbone, rather than the public internet, which is exactly what benefits users far from the bucket's Region. Same-Region Replication only copies objects to another bucket in the same Region after they have already landed in S3; it does nothing to speed up the initial long-distance upload. Intelligent-Tiering only changes which access tier an object's storage cost falls into based on access patterns and has no effect on network transfer speed. Object Lock in Compliance mode only prevents deletion or modification of objects for a retention period and is unrelated to transfer performance.
Source: AWS S3 docs: Configuring fast, secure file transfers using Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration