AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 677

A company's lease of a colocated storage facility will expire in 90 days. The company wants to move to AWS to avoid signing a contract extension. The company's environment consists of 200 virtual machines and a NAS with 40 TB of data. Most of the data is archival, yet instant access is required when data is requested.
Leadership wants to ensure minimal downtime during the migration. Each virtual machine has a number of customized configurations. The company's existing 1
Gbps network connection is mostly idle, especially after business hours.
Which combination of steps should the company take to migrate to AWS while minimizing downtime and operational impact? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Use new Amazon EC2 instances and reinstall all application code.
• B. Use AWS SMS to migrate the virtual machines.
• C. Use AWS Storage Gateway to migrate the data to cloud-native storage.
• D. Use AWS Snowball to migrate the data.
• E. Use AWS SMS to copy the infrequently accessed data from the NAS.

Correct answer: B, C

Explanation

Using AWS SMS allows the company to migrate their 200 customized virtual machines incrementally with minimal downtime, avoiding the high operational impact of rebuilding them on new Amazon EC2 instances. To migrate the 40 TB of NAS data over the idle 1 Gbps connection, AWS Storage Gateway is the ideal choice as it seamlessly transfers data to cloud-native storage while supporting immediate access requirements. AWS Snowball is unnecessary given the available bandwidth and 90-day window, and AWS SMS is not designed for migrating NAS file data.