AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 460
A company is hosting its website by using Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer across multiple Availability Zones. The instances run in an
EC2 Auto Scaling group. The website uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes to store product manuals for users to download. The company updates the product content often, so new instances launched by the Auto Scaling group often have old data. It can take up to 30 minutes for the new instances to receive all the updates. The updates also require the EBS volumes to be resized during business hours.
The company wants to ensure that the product manuals are always up to date on all instances and that the architecture adjusts quickly to increased user demand.
A solutions architect needs to meet these requirements without causing the company to update its application code or adjust its website.
What should the solutions architect do to accomplish this goal?
Answer options
- A. Store the product manuals in an EBS volume. Mount that volume to the EC2 instances.
- B. Store the product manuals in an Amazon S3 bucket. Redirect the downloads to this bucket.
- C. Store the product manuals in an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) volume. Mount that volume to the EC2 instances.
- D. Store the product manuals in an Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) bucket. Redirect the downloads to this bucket.
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Amazon EFS is a shared file system that can be mounted simultaneously on multiple Amazon EC2 instances across different Availability Zones, ensuring that any update to the manuals is instantly available to all instances without synchronization delays. Because EFS automatically scales its storage capacity up or down as files are added or removed, it eliminates the need to manually resize volumes during business hours. Additionally, mounting EFS as a local directory avoids any need to modify the application code or website structure, unlike S3-based solutions which would require rewriting download links.