AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 335

A company runs an application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The application requires low latency and random access to 100 GB of data. The application must be able to access the data at up to 3.000 IOPS. A Development team has configured the EC2 launch template to provision a 100-GB Provisioned IOPS
(PIOPS) Amazon EBS volume with 3 000 IOPS provisioned. A Solutions Architect is tasked with lowering costs without impacting performance and durability.
Which action should be taken?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon EFS file system with the performance mode set to Max I/O. Configure the EC2 operating system to mount the EFS file system.
• B. Create an Amazon EFS file system with the throughput mode set to Provisioned. Configure the EC2 operating system to mount the EFS file system.
• C. Update the EC2 launch template to allocate a new 1-TB EBS General Purpose SSO (gp2) volume.
• D. Update the EC2 launch template to exclude the PIOPS volume. Configure the application to use local instance storage.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

An EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume delivers a baseline performance of 3 IOPS per GiB, meaning a 1-TB volume inherently provides the required 3,000 IOPS at a lower cost than a 100-GB Provisioned IOPS volume. Amazon EFS does not offer the same low-latency random access performance as EBS. Local instance storage is ephemeral and does not satisfy the durability requirement because data is lost when the instance stops.