AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 871

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 the requirement?

Answer options

• A. Connect a large Amazon EBS volume to multiple instances and schedule snapshots.
• B. Deploy Amazon EFS is 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: D

Explanation

AWS Storage Gateway cached volumes allow primary data to be stored in highly scalable Amazon S3 while keeping frequently accessed data cached locally on EC2 for low-latency access. This architecture easily scales to tens of terabytes and supports access across multiple Availability Zones. Other options like Amazon EBS do not support multi-attach across different Availability Zones, and custom EC2 file shares lack the native scalability of Storage Gateway.