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Difficulty: HardAWS Storage Services

An enterprise is migrating a legacy document management system to AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances distributed across three Availability Zones. The instances require concurrent read and write access to a shared directory that supports standard file system operations (POSIX compliance). A large portion of the files consists of compliance reports that are rarely accessed after 30 days but must remain online and accessible with low latency when requested. Which AWS storage solution meets these requirements with the lowest operational overhead?

  1. A
    Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using Mountpoint for Amazon S3 to attach the bucket to the EC2 instances, utilizing S3 Lifecycle policies to transition reports to S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval.
  2. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) with an EFS Lifecycle Management policy configured to transition files to EFS Infrequent Access (IA) after 30 days of inactivity.Answer
  3. C
    Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) with Multi-Attach enabled on Provisioned IOPS volumes, configuring an automated backup policy to Amazon S3 Glacier.
  4. D
    Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) mounted on a single primary EC2 instance, using an AWS Storage Gateway (Volume Gateway) to replicate files to other instances in different Availability Zones.

Answer

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) with an EFS Lifecycle Management policy configured to transition files to EFS Infrequent Access (IA) after 30 days of inactivity.
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is a serverless, fully managed network file system that supports POSIX compliance, allowing multiple Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones to concurrently read and write to the same directory. Furthermore, EFS Lifecycle Management automatically transitions files that have not been accessed for 30 days to the EFS Infrequent Access (IA) storage class, reducing storage costs by up to 92% while keeping the files online and immediately accessible with low latency.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the application requirements.
The application requires shared read/write access from EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones, native POSIX file system compliance, and cost-efficient lifecycle management that keeps files online with low-latency access.
This establishes the constraints needed to evaluate and eliminate unsuitable storage types.
2
Evaluate the storage candidates against POSIX and multi-AZ sharing requirements.
Amazon S3 is object storage (non-POSIX and lacks concurrent write locking). Amazon EBS Multi-Attach is restricted to a single Availability Zone. Amazon EFS is serverless, POSIX-compliant, and natively supports concurrent mounts across multiple Availability Zones.
This identifies Amazon EFS as the correct storage service type for the shared directory.
3
Evaluate the archival and access requirements.
EFS Lifecycle Management transitions inactive files to EFS IA, which reduces costs while maintaining immediate, online low-latency access, satisfying the operational requirements.
This verifies that transitioning to EFS IA keeps files online, unlike S3 Glacier classes which introduce retrieval delays.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate AWS storage service (block, file, or object) based on access patterns, multi-AZ support, POSIX compliance, and lifecycle cost optimization.
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Topics

AWS Storage Services

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