AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 563

A company is testing an application that runs on an Amazon EC2 Linux instance. The instance contains a data volume of 500 GB that consists of a single Amazon
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume.
The application is now ready for production use and will be installed on multiple EC2 instances that run in an Auto Scaling group. All instances need access to the data that was stored on the 500 GB volume. The company needs a highly available and fault-tolerant solution that does not introduce any significant changes to the application's code.
Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Provision an EC2 instance with NFS server software that is configured with a single 500 GB gp2 volume.
• B. Use an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file system that is configured as an SMB file store within a single Availability Zone.
• C. Migrate the data into an Amazon S3 bucket. Use an EC2 instance profile to access the contents of the bucket.
• D. Use an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system that is configured with the General Purpose performance mode.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a fully managed, highly available, and fault-tolerant POSIX-compliant file system that allows concurrent access from multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances without requiring application code changes. Using Amazon S3 would require modifying the application to use S3 APIs instead of file system calls, which violates the requirement of minimal code changes. Additionally, options involving a single EC2-hosted NFS server or a single-AZ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server do not offer the required high availability and fault tolerance.