AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 919

A company is running a media store across multiple Amazon EC2 instances distributed across multiple Availability Zones in a single VPC. The company wants a high-performing solution to share data between all the EC2 instances, and prefers to keep the data within the VPC only.

What should a solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon S3 bucket and call the service APIs from each instance's application
• B. Create an Amazon S3 bucket and configure all instances to access it as a mounted volume
• C. Configure an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume and mount it across all instances
• D. Configure an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system and mount it across all instances

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a fully managed service that provides high-performance, POSIX-compliant file storage that can be concurrently mounted by multiple Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones in a VPC. Amazon EBS volumes do not support multi-instance mounting across different Availability Zones. Amazon S3 is object storage and does not provide a native, high-performance shared file system interface suitable for this low-latency VPC-only configuration.