AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 612

An ecommerce company runs a PostgreSQL database on premises. The database stores data by using high IOPS Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) block storage. The daily peak I/O transactions per second do not exceed 15,000 IOPS. The company wants to migrate the database to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and provision disk IOPS performance independent of disk storage capacity.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Configure the General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volume storage type and provision 15,000 IOPS.
• B. Configure the Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volume storage type and provision 15,000 IOPS.
• C. Configure the General Purpose SSD (gp3) EBS volume storage type and provision 15,000 IOPS.
• D. Configure the EBS magnetic volume type to achieve maximum IOPS.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon RDS gp3 storage volumes allow customers to scale IOPS and throughput independently of storage capacity, making them highly cost-effective for workloads requiring up to 16,000 IOPS. In contrast, gp2 volumes tie IOPS performance to storage size, and io1 volumes are significantly more expensive. Magnetic volumes are legacy storage and cannot support the high IOPS performance required by this workload.