A data engineer manages a provisioned Amazon Redshift cluster that stores petabytes of data.

The correct answer is A because the workload has grown to petabyte scale, but the performance requirement is focused on recent transactions. The best architecture is to keep hot, frequently queried data inside Amazon Redshift and move historical/cold data to Amazon S3. Amazon Redshift Spectrum lets Redshift efficiently query structured and semi-structured files in S3 without loading that data into Redshift tables, and most of the data remains in S3 while Spectrum performs parallel processing. This reduces pressure on the provisioned cluster while preserving query access to historical data. Decreasing nodes would worsen performance. DISTSTYLE ALL for historical tables can increase storage and maintenance overhead. Redshift is already columnar, so switching to row-based storage is not valid.