AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 943

A company is testing an application that runs on an Amazon EC2 Linux instance. A single 500 GB Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) General Purpose SSO (gp2) volume is attached to the EC2 instance.

The company will deploy the application on multiple EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. All instances require access to the data that is stored in the EBS volume. The company needs a highly available and resilient solution that does not introduce significant changes to the application's code.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Provision an EC2 instance that uses NFS server software. Attach a single 500 GB gp2 EBS volume to the instance.
• B. Provision an Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file system. Configure the file system as an SMB file store within a single Availability Zone.
• C. Provision an EC2 instance with two 250 GB Provisioned IOPS SSD EBS volumes.
• D. Provision an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. Configure the file system to use General Purpose performance mode.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon EFS provides a serverless, highly available, and resilient shared file system that natively supports the NFS protocol, allowing multiple Linux EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group to access the same data concurrently. Alternatives such as a self-managed NFS server on EC2 or a single-AZ FSx for Windows file system fail to meet the high availability and seamless Linux compatibility requirements.