AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 696

A company is migrating an application to the AWS Cloud. The application runs in an on-premises data center and writes thousands of images into a mounted NFS file system each night. After the company migrates the application, the company will host the application on an Amazon EC2 instance with a mounted Amazon
Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system.
The company has established an AWS Direct Connect connection to AWS. Before the migration cutover, a solutions architect must build a process that will replicate the newly created on-premises images to the EFS file system.
What is the MOST operationally efficient way to replicate the images?

Answer options

• A. Configure a periodic process to run the aws s3 sync command from the on-premises file system to Amazon S3. Configure an AWS Lambda function to process event notifications from Amazon S3 and copy the images from Amazon S3 to the EFS file system.
• B. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway file gateway with an NFS mount point. Mount the file gateway file system on the on-premises server. Configure a process to periodically copy the images to the mount point.
• C. Deploy an AWS DataSync agent to an on-premises server that has access to the NFS file system. Send data over the Direct Connect connection to an S3 bucket by using public VIF. Configure an AWS Lambda function to process event notifications from Amazon S3 and copy the images from Amazon S3 to the EFS file system.
• D. Deploy an AWS DataSync agent to an on-premises server that has access to the NFS file system. Send data over the Direct Connect connection to an AWS PrivateLink interface VPC endpoint for Amazon EFS by using a private VIF. Configure a DataSync scheduled task to send the images to the EFS file system every 24 hours.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

AWS DataSync is designed specifically for fast, secure, and automated data transfer between on-premises storage and AWS services like Amazon EFS. Option D is the most operationally efficient because it replicates files directly to the destination Amazon EFS file system over a private VIF using a VPC endpoint, avoiding the overhead of intermediate S3 staging and Lambda functions. Other options either introduce unnecessary architectural complexity or do not utilize DataSync's native ability to sync directly to Amazon EFS.