AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 632

A company is building an application on Amazon EC2 instances that generates temporary transactional data. The application requires access to data storage that can provide configurable and consistent IOPS.
What should a solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Provision an EC2 instance with a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) root volume and a Cold HDD (sc1) data volume.
• B. Provision an EC2 instance with a Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volume that will serve as the root and data volume.
• C. Provision an EC2 instance with a General Purpose SSD (gp2) root volume and Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) data volume.
• D. Provision an EC2 instance with a General Purpose SSD (gp2) root volume. Configure the application to store its data in an Amazon S3 bucket.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes are designed specifically for critical, I/O-intensive database and transactional workloads that require predictable and customizable IOPS performance. HDD volumes (st1 and sc1) are designed for throughput-focused workloads rather than high-IOPS transactional workloads, and cannot be used as boot volumes. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that does not provide the block-level storage performance and consistent IOPS required for transactional application data.