AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design High-Performing ArchitecturesEasy
A company is migrating a legacy on-premises application that relies heavily on a shared file system accessible via NFS. The application requires low-latency access and consistent throughput, and multiple EC2 instances need to concurrently read and write to the same file system. Which AWS storage service is the most appropriate for this scenario?
- AAmazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp3)
- BAmazon FSx for Windows File Server
- CAmazon S3 Standard
- DAmazon EFS Standard
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Amazon EFS Standard
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is a scalable, elastic, cloud-native NFS file system. It provides shared file storage that can be mounted by multiple EC2 instances concurrently, offering low-latency access and consistent throughput, making it ideal for lift-and-shift of legacy NFS-dependent applications.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Amazon EBS volumes are block storage attached to a single EC2 instance (with EBS Multi-Attach for limited use cases), not a shared file system across multiple instances by default.
- B. Amazon FSx for Windows File Server provides SMB file shares, not NFS, and is specifically for Windows-based workloads.
- C. Amazon S3 is object storage, not a shared file system accessible via NFS.
Amazon EFS
A fully managed, scalable, and elastic NFS file system that can be shared across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.
- Supports NFSv4 protocol.
- Automatically scales storage capacity and performance.
- Accessible from multiple EC2 instances concurrently.
- Regional service, data is stored across multiple Availability Zones.
Memory trick: Shared files in the cloud, EFS shouts loud!