Distribute a 5 GB game package through S3 and CloudFront instead of on-premises FTP
A company has developed a new release of a popular video game and wants to make it available for public download. The new release package is approximately 5 GB in size. The company provides downloads for existing releases from a Linux-based, publicly facing FTP site hosted in an on-premises data center. The company expects the new release will be downloaded by users worldwide. The company wants a solution that provides improved download performance and low transfer costs, regardless of a user's location.
Community Votes
100% of anonymous learners picked answer C. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.
Community Insight
CloudFront caches the object at edge locations worldwide, so the download is served from a nearby edge rather than from the publisher's data center, and S3 origin transfer to CloudFront is free, which is what makes global distribution low cost.
A game publisher currently serves downloads for existing releases from a Linux FTP site in an on-premises data center and needs to publish a new 5 GB release for download by users worldwide with better performance and low transfer cost regardless of user location.
Rehosting the FTP service on EC2 with an Application Load Balancer. That preserves the same single-origin architecture with a long-distance path to every user, and an ALB is layer 7 HTTP rather than FTP, so serving downloads through it does not work without a protocol change on the client side.
Community Discussion (6 comments)
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Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
The requirement is improved download performance and low transfer cost for users anywhere in the world, and that is exactly the problem CloudFront solves. The 5 GB package is uploaded once to an Amazon S3 bucket, and CloudFront distributes and caches it at edge locations around the world so each user downloads from a nearby edge, which removes the long path to an on-premises data center. Data transfer from S3 to CloudFront is free, and Route 53 provides the public DNS for the download URL, so there is no per-gigabyte origin egress charge for the downloads themselves. The whole delivery path is a static website with no origin server to operate.Why the Other Options Are Wrong
A and B: Running an FTP service on EC2 or EFS instances behind an Application Load Balancer keeps the origin in a single data center, so users still download across long distances and the performance problem remains. In addition, an Application Load Balancer handles HTTP and HTTPS rather than FTP, and EFS storage adds shared file system cost for what is a static distribution use case. D: Requester Pays makes the end users pay for the S3 requests and data transfer, which shifts cost to the customers downloading the release rather than reducing the publisher's transfer cost, and it exposes a raw S3 URL rather than a cached distribution path.Community Comment Notes
The community voted 100 to 0 for C, and the reasoning was that S3 with CloudFront is the standard answer for globally distributed large file downloads, with one commenter noting that Requester Pays is unnecessary here because the goal is the publisher's low transfer cost rather than shifting it to users.Official Reference
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