AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 955

You're running an application on-premises due to its dependency on non-x86 hardware and want to use AWS for data backup. Your backup application is only able to write to POSIX-compatible block-based storage. You have 140TB of data and would like to mount it as a single folder on your file server. Users must be able to access portions of this data while the backups are taking place.
What backup solution would be most appropriate for this use case?

Answer options

• A. Use Storage Gateway and configure it to use Gateway Cached volumes.
• B. Configure your backup software to use S3 as the target for your data backups.
• C. Configure your backup software to use Glacier as the target for your data backups.
• D. Use Storage Gateway and configure it to use Gateway Stored volumes.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway with Gateway-Cached volumes is the ideal choice because it stores the primary dataset in Amazon S3 while keeping a cache of recently accessed data locally, fulfilling the POSIX-compliant block storage requirement for 140TB of data. Gateway-Stored volumes (Option D) would require the entire 140TB to be stored on-premises, which defeats the purpose of offloading backup storage to the cloud. Direct integration with S3 (Option B) or Glacier (Option C) is not supported because the backup software requires a block-based POSIX file system interface rather than object storage APIs.