AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 58

You have been asked to design the storage layer for an application. The application requires disk performance of at least 100,000 IOPS. In addition, the storage layer must be able to survive the loss of an individual disk, EC2 instance, or Availability Zone without any data loss. The volume you provide must have a capacity of at least 3 TB.
Which of the following designs will meet these objectives?

Answer options

• A. Instantiate a c3.8xlarge instance in us-east-1. Provision 4x1TB EBS volumes, attach them to the instance, and configure them as a single RAID 5 volume. Ensure that EBS snapshots are performed every 15 minutes.
• B. Instantiate a c3.8xlarge instance in us-east-1. Provision 3xlTB EBS volumes, attach them to the Instance, and configure them as a single RAID 0 volume. Ensure that EBS snapshots are performed every 15 minutes.
• C. Instantiate an i2.8xlarge instance in us-east-1a. Create a RAID 0 volume using the four 800GB SSD ephemeral disks provided with the instance. Provision 3x1TB EBS volumes, attach them to the instance, and configure them as a second RAID 0 volume. Configure synchronous, block-level replication from the ephemeral-backed volume to the EBS-backed volume.
• D. Instantiate a c3.8xlarge instance in us-east-1. Provision an AWS Storage Gateway and configure it for 3 TB of storage and 100,000 IOPS. Attach the volume to the instance.
• E. Instantiate an i2.8xlarge instance in us-east-1a. Create a RAID 0 volume using the four 800GB SSD ephemeral disks provided with the instance. Configure synchronous, block-level replication to an identically configured instance in us-east-1b.

Correct answer: E

Explanation

Option E is correct because it uses RAID 0 with the ephemeral disks and replicates to another instance in a different Availability Zone, ensuring high performance and data redundancy. Options A and B do not provide redundancy against disk or instance failure due to their RAID configurations, and option D does not meet the performance requirement of 100,000 IOPS. Option C, while it includes replication, does not provide the same level of availability as option E since it relies on a single instance for both RAID volumes.