AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 637

A company uses a legacy on-premises analytics application that operates on gigabytes of .csv files and represents months of data. The legacy application cannot handle the growing size of .csv files. New .csv files are added daily from various data sources to a central on-premises storage location. The company wants to continue to support the legacy application while users learn AWS analytics services. To achieve this, a solutions architect wants to maintain two synchronized copies of all the .csv files on-premises and in Amazon S3.
Which solution should the solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Deploy AWS DataSync on-premises. Configure DataSync to continuously replicate the .csv files between the company's on-premises storage and the company's S3 bucket.
• B. Deploy an on-premises file gateway. Configure data sources to write the .csv files to the file gateway. Point the legacy analytics application to the file gateway. The file gateway should replicate the .csv files to Amazon S3.
• C. Deploy an on-premises volume gateway. Configure data sources to write the .csv files to the volume gateway. Point the legacy analytics application to the volume gateway. The volume gateway should replicate data to Amazon S3.
• D. Deploy AWS DataSync on-premises. Configure DataSync to continuously replicate the .csv files between on-premises and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Enable replication from Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to the company's S3 bucket.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS DataSync is designed to continuously and efficiently replicate file data between existing on-premises storage systems and Amazon S3 without requiring changes to how the legacy application or data sources access the files. Using Storage Gateway options would require reconfiguring the legacy application and data sources to point to new gateway mount points, which introduces unnecessary operational overhead. Replicating files to Amazon EFS first before moving them to Amazon S3 adds redundant architectural layers and increases costs.