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Difficulty: MediumHigh-Performing and Scalable Storage Solutions

A company is deploying a media rendering application on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances distributed across three Availability Zones. The instances require concurrent, shared access to a 500 GB500\text{ GB} dataset. The workload is highly read-heavy and requires low-latency shared file access. The shared files are temporary and are deleted within 10 days10\text{ days} of creation. Which storage solution should a solutions architect recommend to achieve the highest performance and cost-efficiency?

  1. Provision an Amazon EFS file system using Elastic throughput and mount it on the EC2 instances across the Availability Zones.Answer
  2. B
    Configure an Amazon EBS gp3 volume and enable Multi-Attach to share the volume concurrently across all EC2 instances.
  3. C
    Store the dataset in an Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) bucket and access the objects directly from the instances.
  4. D
    Store the dataset in an Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval vault and configure the EC2 instances to retrieve the files when rendering starts.

Answer

Provision an Amazon EFS file system using Elastic throughput and mount it on the EC2 instances across the Availability Zones.
Amazon EFS is a managed file storage service that natively supports concurrent, shared access across multiple Availability Zones in a Region. Using Elastic throughput ensures that the file system dynamically handles high-throughput spikes associated with read-heavy rendering. Furthermore, EFS has no minimum storage duration fee, making it the most cost-effective choice for a dataset that is deleted after 10 days10\text{ days}.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the architectural need for concurrent, multi-AZ shared access.
Amazon EBS is ruled out because standard volumes cannot span multiple Availability Zones, and EBS Multi-Attach is limited to a single Availability Zone.
Ensure that the proposed storage layer can physically connect to compute instances across three different Availability Zones.
2
Evaluate Amazon EFS throughput configuration options against a read-heavy workload.
Amazon EFS natively supports multi-AZ mount targets. Configuring it with Elastic throughput ensures that performance scales dynamically to handle the read-heavy demands of the rendering application.
Select a performance configuration that matches the access behavior of the application without unnecessary over-provisioning.
3
Calculate the cost implications of temporary data retention (10 days10\text{ days}) across EFS and S3 storage classes.
EFS charges only for the actual storage used with no minimum storage duration. Amazon S3 Standard-IA imposes a 30 day30\text{ day} minimum charge and data retrieval fees, resulting in higher costs for short-lived, frequently read datasets.
Compare storage class lifecycle rules and data access charges to select the most cost-effective solution.

Key Concept

Selecting shared, multi-AZ storage that matches high-throughput read requirements and optimizes cost for short-term workloads.
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Topics

High-Performing and Scalable Storage Solutions

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