AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 6

A company is currently running a production workload on AWS that is very I/O intensive. Its workload consists of a single tier with 10 c4.8xlarge instances, each with 2 TB gp2 volumes. The number of processing jobs has recently increased, and latency has increased as well. The team realizes that they are constrained on the IOPS. For the application to perform efficiently, they need to increase the IOPS by 3,000 for each of the instances.
Which of the following designs will meet the performance goal MOST cost effectively?

Answer options

• A. Change the type of Amazon EBS volume from gp2 to io1 and set provisioned IOPS to 9,000.
• B. Increase the size of the gp2 volumes in each instance to 3 TB.
• C. Create a new Amazon EFS file system and move all the data to this new file system. Mount this file system to all 10 instances.
• D. Create a new Amazon S3 bucket and move all the data to this new bucket. Allow each instance to access this S3 bucket and use it for storage.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because increasing the size of the gp2 volumes directly raises the IOPS limit, allowing the instances to achieve the necessary performance increase without incurring the higher costs associated with provisioned IOPS in io1 volumes. Option A would require more expense for the provisioned IOPS. Options C and D are not suitable as they involve moving to entirely different storage solutions that may not provide the required performance improvement in an I/O intensive workload.