A media company serves the same set of video thumbnails to users worldwide, with high read volume and infrequent updates. Which solution minimizes latency most cost-effectively?
A) Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration on the source bucket.
B) Deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the origin.
C) Create cross-region replication to S3 buckets in every AWS region.
D) Increase the EC2 instance size hosting the application server.
Correct Answer: B
Explanation: CloudFront is a CDN that caches content at edge locations close to end users, which is ideal for frequently-read, infrequently-changed static content like thumbnails. It reduces latency for repeat reads and reduces load (and cost) on the origin S3 bucket.
Why the others are wrong: (A) Transfer Acceleration speeds up uploads to S3 over long distances — it doesn’t help with serving reads to many viewers. (C) Cross-region replication adds storage cost and complexity without solving last-mile latency the way edge caching does. (D) is irrelevant since the scenario involves serving static files from S3, not application server load.