AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 304

A company hosts a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment on AWS. The CI/CD environment includes a Jenkins server that is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. A 500 GB General Purpose SSD (gp2) Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume is attached to the EC2 instance.

Because of disk throughput limitations, the Jenkins server reports performance issues that are resulting in slower builds on the server. The EBS volume needs to sustain 3,000 IOPS while performing nightly build tasks.

A SysOps administrator examines the server's history in Amazon CloudWatch. The BurstBalance metric has had a value of 0 during nightly builds. The SysOps administrator needs to improve the performance and meet the sustained throughput requirements.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Double the gp2 EBS volume size from 500 GB to 1,000 GB.
• B. Change the volume type from gp2 to General Purpose SSD (gp3).
• C. Change the volume type from gp2 to Throughput Optimized HDD (st1).
• D. Change the volume type from gp2 to Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2).

Correct answer: B

Explanation

General Purpose SSD (gp3) volumes offer a baseline performance of 3,000 IOPS regardless of the provisioned volume size, and they are cheaper per GB than gp2 volumes, making this the most cost-effective choice. While doubling the gp2 volume size to 1,000 GB would provide 3,000 baseline IOPS, it would require paying for unused storage capacity. Provisioned IOPS (io2) is much more expensive, and Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) cannot deliver the required IOPS performance.