AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 230

You are tasked with setting up a cluster of EC2 Instances for a NoSQL database. The database requires random read I/O disk performance up to a 100,000 IOPS at 4KB block side per node.
Which of the following EC2 instances will perform the best for this workload?

Answer options

• A. A High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large (m2.4xlarge) with EBS-Optimized set to true and a PIOPs EBS volume
• B. A Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (cc2.8xlarge) using instance storage
• C. High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (hi1.4xlarge) using instance storage
• D. A Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large (cg1.4xlarge) using four separate 4000 PIOPS EBS volumes in a RAID 0 configuration

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (hi1.4xlarge) instance is specifically designed for high random I/O performance, making it the best choice for a NoSQL database requiring up to 100,000 IOPS. The other options either use EBS volumes that may not provide the necessary IOPS or are optimized for different workloads, such as GPU processing or compute-intensive tasks, which are less suitable for this scenario.