AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 344

A gaming company is moving its public scoreboard from a data center to the AWS Cloud. The company uses Amazon EC2 Windows Server instances behind an Application Load Balancer to host its dynamic application. The company needs a highly available storage solution for the application. The application consists of static files and dynamic server-side code.

Which combination of steps should a solutions architect take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Store the static files on Amazon S3. Use Amazon CloudFront to cache objects at the edge.
• B. Store the static files on Amazon S3. Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache objects at the edge.
• C. Store the server-side code on Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Mount the EFS volume on each EC2 instance to share the files.
• D. Store the server-side code on Amazon FSx for Windows File Server. Mount the FSx for Windows File Server volume on each EC2 instance to share the files.
• E. Store the server-side code on a General Purpose SSD (gp2) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. Mount the EBS volume on each EC2 instance to share the files.

Correct answer: A, D

Explanation

Storing static files in Amazon S3 and caching them using Amazon CloudFront is the recommended best practice for lowering latency and offloading traffic from the origin. Since the application runs on Windows Server instances, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is the ideal shared storage solution because it natively supports the SMB protocol required by Windows. Amazon EFS is designed for Linux workloads, and standard gp2 EBS volumes cannot be attached to multiple EC2 instances simultaneously to act as a shared file system.