AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 839

A large global company wants to migrate a stateless mission-critical application to AWS. The application is based on IBM WebSphere (application and integration middleware), IBM MQ (messaging middleware), and IBM DB2 (database software) on a z/OS operating system.
How should the Solutions Architect migrate the application to AWS?

Answer options

• A. Re-host WebSphere-based applications on Amazon EC2 behind a load balancer with Auto Scaling. Re-platform the IBM MQ to an Amazon EC2-based MQ. Re-platform the z/OS-based DB2 to Amazon RDS DB2.
• B. Re-host WebSphere-based applications on Amazon EC2 behind a load balancer with Auto Scaling. Re-platform the IBM MQ to an Amazon MQ. Re-platform z/ OS-based DB2 to Amazon EC2-based DB2.
• C. Orchestrate and deploy the application by using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Re-platform the IBM MQ to Amazon SQS. Re-platform z/OS-based DB2 to Amazon RDS DB2.
• D. Use the AWS Server Migration Service to migrate the IBM WebSphere and IBM DB2 to an Amazon EC2-based solution. Re-platform the IBM MQ to an Amazon MQ.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because migrating a mainframe-based DB2 (z/OS) requires the flexibility of Amazon EC2 to host the DB2 database properly, as Amazon RDS does not support direct z/OS-equivalent DB2 migrations. Amazon MQ provides a managed message broker service compatible with existing JMS-based IBM MQ configurations, and WebSphere can be successfully re-hosted on EC2 with Auto Scaling for high availability. Other options are incorrect because AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) cannot migrate z/OS mainframe architectures, and Elastic Beanstalk does not natively support this complex enterprise middleware stack.