AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 906

A company recently performed a lift and shift migration of its on-premises Oracle database workload to run on an Amazon EC2 memory optimized Linux instance. The EC2 Linux instance uses a 1 TB Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volume with 64,000 IOPS.

The database storage performance after the migration is slower than the performance of the on-premises database.

Which solution will improve storage performance?

Answer options

• A. Add more Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volumes. Use OS commands to create a Logical Volume Management (LVM) stripe.
• B. Increase the Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volume to more than 64,000 IOPS.
• C. Increase the size of the Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volume to 2 TB.
• D. Change the EC2 Linux instance to a storage optimized instance type. Do not change the Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) EBS volume.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

A single Amazon EBS io1 volume has a maximum performance limit of 64,000 IOPS, meaning the current volume is already at its limit. Striping multiple EBS volumes together using OS-level Logical Volume Management (LVM) aggregates their performance and bypasses the single-volume bottleneck. Simply resizing the volume, increasing IOPS beyond the single-volume ceiling, or switching instance types without changing the storage configuration will not resolve this constraint.