AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 685

A company runs multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances in a VPC across two Availability Zones. The instances host applications that use a hierarchical directory structure. The applications need to read and write rapidly and concurrently to shared storage.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Mount the EFS file system from each EC2 instance.
• B. Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Allow access from all the EC2 instances in the VPC.
• C. Create a file system on a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. Attach the EBS volume to all the EC2 instances.
• D. Create file systems on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that are attached to each EC2 instance. Synchronize the EBS volumes across the different EC2 instances.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is designed to provide concurrent, high-performance shared storage with a hierarchical directory structure for Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. Amazon S3 is an object store with a flat namespace rather than a native hierarchical file system, making it unsuitable for this application. Amazon EBS volumes are block-level storage and cannot be easily mounted concurrently across multiple Availability Zones to serve as a shared, synchronized file system.