AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 417
You have launched an EC2 instance with four (4) 500 GB EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes attached. The EC2 instance is EBS-Optimized and supports 500 Mbps throughput between EC2 and EBS. The four EBS volumes are configured as a single RAID 0 device, and each Provisioned IOPS volume is provisioned with 4,000
IOPS (4,000 16KB reads or writes), for a total of 16,000 random IOPS on the instance. The EC2 instance initially delivers the expected 16,000 IOPS random read and write performance. Sometime later, in order to increase the total random I/O performance of the instance, you add an additional two 500 GB EBS Provisioned
IOPS volumes to the RAID. Each volume is provisioned to 4,000 IOPs like the original four, for a total of 24,000 IOPS on the EC2 instance. Monitoring shows that the EC2 instance CPU utilization increased from 50% to 70%, but the total random IOPS measured at the instance level does not increase at all.
What is the problem and a valid solution?
Answer options
- A. The EBS-Optimized throughput limits the total IOPS that can be utilized; use an EBSOptimized instance that provides larger throughput.
- B. Small block sizes cause performance degradation, limiting the I/O throughput; configure the instance device driver and filesystem to use 64KB blocks to increase throughput.
- C. The standard EBS Instance root volume limits the total IOPS rate; change the instance root volume to also be a 500GB 4,000 Provisioned IOPS volume.
- D. Larger storage volumes support higher Provisioned IOPS rates; increase the provisioned volume storage of each of the 6 EBS volumes to 1TB.
- E. RAID 0 only scales linearly to about 4 devices; use RAID 0 with 4 EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, but increase each Provisioned IOPS EBS volume to 6,000 IOPS.
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The maximum throughput of the EBS-Optimized instance (500 Mbps) acts as a hard limit on the total I/O transfer rate. At 16,000 IOPS with 16KB blocks, the required throughput is 256 MB/s (or 2,048 Mbps), which already heavily saturates the instance's dedicated connection limit. To resolve this bottleneck and achieve the target of 24,000 IOPS, you must upgrade to an EC2 instance type that supports a higher EBS-Optimized throughput rate.