AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 50

A company wants to improve its ability to clone large amounts of production data into a test environment in the same AWS Region. The data is stored in Amazon EC2 instances on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Modifications to the cloned data must not affect the production environment. The software that accesses this data requires consistently high I/O performance.
A solutions architect needs to minimize the time that is required to clone the production data into the test environment.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Restore the snapshots onto EC2 instance store volumes in the test environment.
• B. Configure the production EBS volumes to use the EBS Multi-Attach feature. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Attach the production EBS volumes to the EC2 instances in the test environment.
• C. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Create and initialize new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment before restoring the volumes from the production EBS snapshots.
• D. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Turn on the EBS fast snapshot restore feature on the EBS snapshots. Restore the snapshots into new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Option D is correct because it utilizes the EBS fast snapshot restore feature, which significantly reduces the time required to restore EBS snapshots, meeting the requirement for efficient cloning of production data. Other options either do not leverage the fast snapshot restore feature or involve processes that could take longer, such as creating and initializing new volumes without the benefit of fast restoration.