AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 646

A research company runs experiments that are powered by a simulation application and a visualization application. The simulation application runs on Linux and outputs intermediate data to an NFS share every 5 minutes. The visualization application is a Windows desktop application that displays the simulation output and requires an SMB file system.
The company maintains two synchronized file systems. This strategy is causing data duplication and inefficient resource usage. The company needs to migrate the applications to AWS without making code changes to either application.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Migrate both applications to AWS Lambda. Create an Amazon S3 bucket to exchange data between the applications.
• B. Migrate both applications to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Configure Amazon FSx File Gateway for storage.
• C. Migrate the simulation application to Linux Amazon EC2 instances. Migrate the visualization application to Windows EC2 instances. Configure Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to exchange data between the applications.
• D. Migrate the simulation application to Linux Amazon EC2 instances. Migrate the visualization application to Windows EC2 instances. Configure Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for storage.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides a fully managed shared storage solution that supports concurrent multi-protocol access, allowing the Linux simulation app to write via NFS and the Windows visualization app to read via SMB on the same volume. Deploying the applications on Linux and Windows Amazon EC2 instances preserves the native operating environments, avoiding any application code rewrites. Other solutions either require code changes to support S3/SQS or do not support the native desktop and multi-protocol file access requirements.