AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 349

An application accesses data through a file system interface. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones, all of which must share the same data. While the amount of data is currently small, the company anticipates that it will grow to tens of terabytes over the lifetime of the application.

What is the MOST scalable storage solution to fulfill this requirement?

Answer options

• A. Connect a large Amazon EBS volume to multiple instances and schedule snapshots.
• B. Deploy Amazon EFS in the VPC and create mount targets in multiple subnets.
• C. Launch an EC2 instance and share data using SMB/CIFS or NFS.
• D. Deploy an AWS Storage Gateway cached volume on Amazon EC2.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon EFS is a fully managed, highly scalable file storage service that natively supports concurrent access from Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. While Amazon EBS Multi-Attach has limitations and does not scale easily to tens of terabytes across multiple AZs, self-managed NFS/SMB on EC2 or AWS Storage Gateway cached volumes introduce unnecessary management overhead and scaling complexities. Therefore, Amazon EFS is the most scalable and resilient solution for shared file access in this scenario.