prepexam

A company has a custom application running on an Amazon EC instance that: * Reads a large amount of data from Amazon S3 * Performs a multi-stage analysis * Writes the results to Amazon DynamoDB The application writes a significant number of large, temporary files during the multi-stage analysis. The process performance depends on the temporary storage performance. What would be the fastest storage option for holding the temporary files? A. Multiple Amazon S3 buckets with Transfer Acceleration for storage. B. Multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) drives with Provisioned IOPS and EBS optimization. C. Multiple Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) volumes using the Network File System version 4.1 (NFSv4.1) protocol. D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.

Edit

Let me think through this step by step:

1. First, let's understand what we need:

   • Storage for temporary files

   • High performance requirement

   • Local processing on an EC2 instance

2. Let's analyze each option: A. Amazon S3 with Transfer Acceleration

   • Network-based storage

   • Higher latency due to API calls

   • Not ideal for frequent read/write operations

   B. Multiple EBS volumes with Provisioned IOPS

   • Network-attached block storage

   • Good performance but still has network overhead

   • Consistent and predictable performance

   C. Amazon EFS with NFSv4.1

   • Network-based file system

   • Higher latency than block storage

   • Better for shared access than temporary files

   D. Instance store volumes with RAID 0

   • Direct attached storage (physically attached to host)

   • Lowest possible latency

   • RAID 0 provides increased throughput

   • No network overhead

3. For temporary files during processing:

   • Local storage will be faster than network storage

   • Instance store provides direct hardware access

   • RAID 0 across multiple volumes increases performance

   • No network latency involved

The correct answer is D. Multiple instance store volumes with software RAID 0.

This is the fastest option because:

1. Instance store provides direct hardware access with no network overhead

2. Multiple volumes in RAID 0 configuration provide parallel I/O

3. Perfect for temporary files as the storage is ephemeral anyway

4. No network bottlenecks compared to EBS, EFS, or S3