AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 398

A solutions architect must migrate a Windows Internet Information Services (IIS) web application to AWS. The application currently relies on a file share hosted in the user's on-premises network-attached storage (NAS). The solutions architect has proposed migrating the IIS web servers to Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones that are connected to the storage solution, and configuring an Elastic Load Balancer attached to the instances.

Which replacement to the on-premises file share is MOST resilient and durable?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the file share to Amazon RDS.
• B. Migrate the file share to AWS Storage Gateway.
• C. Migrate the file share to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
• D. Migrate the file share to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides fully managed, highly reliable, and redundant Windows file shares using the SMB protocol, making it the perfect fit for Windows IIS workloads across multiple Availability Zones. Amazon EFS is optimized for Linux workloads and lacks native Windows SMB support. Amazon RDS is a relational database service, not a file share, while AWS Storage Gateway is intended for hybrid environments rather than high-resiliency cloud-native application storage.