AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 640

A company has a custom application running on an Amazon EC instance that:
* Reads a large amount of data from Amazon S3
* Performs a multi-stage analysis
* Writes the results to Amazon DynamoDB
The application writes a significant number of large, temporary files during the multi-stage analysis. The process performance depends on the temporary storage performance.
What would be the fastest storage option for holding the temporary files?

Answer options

• A. Multiple Amazon S3 buckets with Transfer Acceleration for storage.
• B. Multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) drives with Provisioned IOPS and EBS optimization.
• C. Multiple Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) volumes using the Network File System version 4.1 (NFSv4.1) protocol.
• D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Instance store volumes provide the lowest latency and highest write performance because they are physically attached to the host computer, and striping them with RAID 0 maximizes throughput for temporary scratch space. Amazon EBS and Amazon EFS are network-attached storage solutions that introduce network latency, making them slower than local instance stores. Amazon S3 is an object storage service and is not designed for the high-speed local block-level operations required by this temporary workload.