AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 962

A company is running a .NET three-tier web application on AWS. The team currently uses XL storage optimized instances to store and serve the website's image and video files on local instance storage. The company has encountered issues with data loss from replication and instance failures. The Solutions Architect has been asked to redesign this application to improve its reliability while keeping costs low.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Set up a new Amazon EFS share, move all image and video files to this share, and then attach this new drive as a mount point to all existing servers. Create an Elastic Load Balancer with Auto Scaling general purpose instances. Enable Amazon CloudFront to the Elastic Load Balancer. Enable Cost Explorer and use AWS Trusted Advisor checks to continue monitoring the environment for future savings.
• B. Implement Auto Scaling with general purpose instance types and an Elastic Load Balancer. Enable an Amazon CloudFront distribution to Amazon S3 and move images and video files to Amazon S3. Reserve general purpose instances to meet base performance requirements. Use Cost Explorer and AWS Trusted Advisor checks to continue monitoring the environment for future savings.
• C. Move the entire website to Amazon S3 using the S3 website hosting feature. Remove all the web servers and have Amazon S3 communicate directly with the application servers in Amazon VPC.
• D. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy the .NET application. Move all images and video files to Amazon EFS. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution that points to the EFS share. Reserve the m4.4xl instances needed to meet base performance requirements.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Migrating static media assets to Amazon S3 and serving them via Amazon CloudFront eliminates the risk of data loss from local instance storage failures while significantly lowering costs. Transitioning from expensive storage-optimized instances to general-purpose instances configured with Auto Scaling, an Elastic Load Balancer, and Reserved Instances for baseline capacity ensures high reliability and cost efficiency. Other options are incorrect because Amazon EFS is more expensive than Amazon S3 for static media storage, and a dynamic .NET application cannot run purely on S3 static hosting.