AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 718

A company is creating a new application that will store a large amount of data. The data will be analyzed hourly and modified by several Amazon EC2 Linux instances that are deployed across multiple Availability Zones. The application team believes the amount of space needed will continue to grow for the next 6 months.
Which set of actions should a solutions architect take to support these needs?

Answer options

• A. Store the data in an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. Mount the EBS volume on the application instances.
• B. Store the data in an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Mount the file system on the application instances.
• C. Store the data in Amazon S3 Glacier. Update the S3 Glacier vault policy to allow access to the application instances.
• D. Store the data in an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Provisioned IOPS volume shared between the application instances.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon EFS is the ideal choice because it provides a fully managed, elastic file system that can be mounted concurrently by multiple Amazon EC2 Linux instances across different Availability Zones. Amazon EBS volumes (A and D) cannot be easily shared across multiple Availability Zones for concurrent read/write operations by multiple instances. Amazon S3 Glacier (C) is designed for cold archiving and does not support the frequent, low-latency modifications and hourly analysis required by the application.