AWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalDesign Solutions for Organizational ComplexityEasy

A media streaming company is experiencing sudden spikes in traffic during popular live events, leading to performance degradation and outages for their on-demand content. The company wants to ensure that its on-demand streaming service remains highly available and performs optimally even during such traffic surges. The solution must be cost-effective and require minimal operational overhead. Which architectural pattern and AWS services should be implemented?

  1. AHost content on Amazon FSx for Lustre, front it with an AWS Global Accelerator, and manage user sessions with Amazon ElastiCache.
  2. BDeploy the on-demand content on Amazon EC2 instances within an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Use Amazon RDS for metadata storage.
  3. CUse Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for video storage, stream content through Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, and process with AWS Elemental MediaLive.
  4. DStore all on-demand video assets in Amazon S3, distribute content via Amazon CloudFront, and use AWS Lambda@Edge for dynamic content routing.
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: D. Store all on-demand video assets in Amazon S3, distribute content via Amazon CloudFront, and use AWS Lambda@Edge for dynamic content routing.

Storing video assets in Amazon S3 provides highly scalable and cost-effective object storage. Amazon CloudFront, a global CDN, caches content close to users, offloading origin servers and handling traffic spikes efficiently. This decouples on-demand content delivery from live event surges, ensuring high availability and performance with minimal operational overhead.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. FSx for Lustre is a high-performance file system, often used for HPC workloads, not typically for cost-effective distribution of on-demand video. Global Accelerator is for improving application availability and performance across multiple regions, but a CDN (CloudFront) is more appropriate for content delivery. ElastiCache is for caching application data, not for content delivery itself.
  • B. EC2 instances and RDS are not the most cost-effective or scalable solutions for serving static video content on demand, especially during massive traffic spikes. Auto Scaling helps, but a CDN is more efficient for content delivery.
  • C. EBS is block storage, not ideal for large-scale video content. Kinesis Video Streams and MediaLive are primarily for live video processing and streaming, not for serving pre-recorded on-demand content efficiently.

Amazon CloudFront

A fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency.

  • Caches content at edge locations worldwide.
  • Reduces load on origin servers.
  • Improves performance and availability.

Memory trick: S3 stores, CloudFront serves, Lambda@Edge optimizes.

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