AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 923

A finance company hosts a data lake in Amazon S3. The company receives financial data records over SFTP each night from several third parties. The company runs its own SFTP server on an Amazon EC2 instance in a public subnet of a VPC. After the files are uploaded, they are moved to the data lake by a cron job that runs on the same instance. The SFTP server is reachable on DNS sftp.example.com through the use of Amazon Route 53.
What should a solutions architect do to improve the reliability and scalability of the SFTP solution?

Answer options

• A. Move the EC2 instance into an Auto Scaling group. Place the EC2 instance behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Update the DNS record sftp.example.com in Route 53 to point to the ALB.
• B. Migrate the SFTP server to AWS Transfer for SFTP. Update the DNS record sftp.example.com in Route 53 to point to the server endpoint hostname.
• C. Migrate the SFTP server to a file gateway in AWS Storage Gateway. Update the DNS record sftp.example.com in Route 53 to point to the file gateway endpoint.
• D. Place the EC2 instance behind a Network Load Balancer (NLB). Update the DNS record sftp.example.com in Route 53 to point to the NLB.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

AWS Transfer for SFTP is a fully managed, highly available, and auto-scaling service that integrates directly with Amazon S3, removing the operational overhead of managing EC2 instances and custom cron jobs. Implementing this service provides a seamless and highly reliable migration path for SFTP workloads. Other options that rely on managing self-hosted SFTP servers on EC2 or using AWS Storage Gateway do not offer the same level of native scalability and simplicity.