AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 484

A company uses on-premises servers to host its applications. The company is running out of storage capacity. The applications use both block storage and NFS storage. The company needs a high-performing solution that supports local caching without re-architecting its existing applications.

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

Answer options

• A. Mount Amazon S3 as a file system to the on-premises servers.
• B. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway to replace NFS storage.
• C. Deploy AWS Snowball Edge to provision NFS mounts to on-premises servers.
• D. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway volume gateway to replace the block storage.
• E. Deploy Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) volumes and mount them to on-premises servers.

Correct answer: B, D

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway is designed to bridge on-premises environments with AWS cloud storage, providing local caching for low-latency access. Specifically, File Gateway supports NFS protocols to replace existing NFS storage (Option B), while Volume Gateway provides block storage via iSCSI to replace local block storage (Option D) without requiring application changes. Other options like direct Amazon S3 mounts, Amazon EFS, or AWS Snowball Edge do not offer the required seamless, high-performance local caching mechanism for both block and file protocols in this hybrid setup.