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Difficulty: HardAWS Storage Services

A data analytics company runs a high-performance transaction processing application on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application requires a temporary block storage volume to serve as a high-speed buffer and scratch space. This volume must provide the lowest possible I/O latency and high throughput. The data is temporary, replicated at the application layer, and does not need to persist if the instance is stopped or terminated. Which AWS storage option best meets these requirements?

  1. A
    Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
  2. Amazon EC2 Instance StoreAnswer
  3. C
    Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
  4. D
    Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Answer

Amazon EC2 Instance Store
The correct answer is Amazon EC2 Instance Store because it provides block-level storage physically attached to the host computer. This physical attachment delivers the lowest possible latency and high random I/O performance required for buffers and scratch space. Since the data is temporary and does not need to persist past the lifetime of the instance, the ephemeral nature of the instance store is fully acceptable.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the storage type requirement
The application requires block storage to act as a high-speed buffer and scratch space, ruling out object storage (Amazon S3) and shared file storage (Amazon EFS).
Scratch space for databases requires local block-level block access for raw read/write operations.
2
Analyze the latency and persistence requirements
The application needs the lowest possible latency and does not require the data to persist when the instance is stopped or terminated.
Evaluating whether persistent network-attached storage (Amazon EBS) or temporary host-attached storage (Amazon EC2 Instance Store) is optimal.
3
Select the optimal AWS storage service
Amazon EC2 Instance Store is physically attached to the host, offering lower latency than network-attached EBS, and its ephemeral nature matches the application's tolerance for data loss.
Choosing the service that matches the physical proximity and persistence characteristics required by the scenario.

Key Concept

AWS Storage Services
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

AWS Storage Services

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