AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 641

A company is building a document storage application on AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones. The company requires the document store to be highly available. The documents need to be returned immediately when requested. The lead engineer has configured the application to use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) to store the documents, but is willing to consider other options to meet the availability requirement.
What should a solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Snapshot the EBS volumes regularly and build new volumes using those snapshots in additional Availability Zones.
• B. Use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the EC2 instance root volumes. Configure the application to build the document store on Amazon S3.
• C. Use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for the EC2 instance root volumes. Configure the application to build the document store on Amazon S3 Glacier.
• D. Use at least three Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes for EC2 instances. Mount the volumes to the EC2 instances in a RAID 5 configuration.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon S3 provides highly durable, multi-AZ storage by default, making it the ideal choice for high availability and immediate document retrieval. Amazon S3 Glacier is incorrect because its retrieval times do not meet the requirement for immediate delivery. Amazon EBS volumes are bound to a single Availability Zone and cannot be easily shared across multiple AZs to provide active-active high availability.