AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 710

A company has a nightly batch processing routine that analyzes report files that an on-premises file system receives daily through SFTP. The company wants to move the solution to the AWS Cloud. The solution must be highly available and resilient. The solution also must minimize operational effort.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Deploy AWS Transfer for SFTP and an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system for storage. Use an Amazon EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group with a scheduled scaling policy to run the batch operation.
• B. Deploy an Amazon EC2 instance that runs Linux and an SFTP service. Use an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume for storage. Use an Auto Scaling group with the minimum number of instances and desired number of instances set to 1.
• C. Deploy an Amazon EC2 instance that runs Linux and an SFTP service. Use an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system for storage. Use an Auto Scaling group with the minimum number of instances and desired number of instances set to 1.
• D. Deploy AWS Transfer for SFTP and an Amazon S3 bucket for storage. Modify the application to pull the batch files from Amazon S3 to an Amazon EC2 instance for processing. Use an EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling group with a scheduled scaling policy to run the batch operation.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Transfer for SFTP is a fully managed, highly available service that eliminates the operational overhead of managing custom SFTP servers on EC2, ruling out options B and C. Integrating AWS Transfer for SFTP with Amazon EFS provides a standard file system interface, meaning the batch processing application does not need to be refactored to pull files from Amazon S3 as required in option D. Additionally, using an Auto Scaling group with a scheduled scaling policy ensures the batch processing EC2 instances are only active and incurring costs during the nightly run.