AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateReliability and Business ContinuityHard
A financial institution uses an Amazon EC2 instance running a custom application to generate daily reports. These reports are stored on an attached 500 GB gp2 EBS volume. The application needs to complete the report generation within a specific 2-hour window every day. Recently, the report generation time has increased significantly, indicating an I/O bottleneck on the EBS volume. The SysOps Administrator observes that the volume's I/O operations per second (IOPS) are consistently hitting their maximum. Which action should the administrator take to immediately improve the EBS volume's performance and ensure the reports are generated on time?
- AEnable EBS Multi-Attach for the gp2 volume and attach it to another EC2 instance.
- BIncrease the size of the gp2 volume to 1 TB to increase the baseline IOPS.
- CConvert the gp2 volume to a Provisioned IOPS (io2) volume with a higher IOPS target.
- DMigrate the data to an Amazon S3 bucket and access it directly from the EC2 instance.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Convert the gp2 volume to a Provisioned IOPS (io2) volume with a higher IOPS target.
Converting to an io2 volume allows provisioning a specific, higher IOPS target (up to 64,000 IOPS per volume), which directly addresses the I/O bottleneck when gp2 volumes are maxed out, providing an immediate and significant performance improvement. gp2 volumes have a maximum of 16,000 IOPS (for volumes 534 GiB and larger), while io2 can go much higher.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. EBS Multi-Attach is only for io1/io2 volumes and is used for shared access from multiple instances, not for improving single-instance I/O performance or for gp2 volumes.
- B. While increasing gp2 volume size increases baseline IOPS (3 IOPS/GiB, up to 16,000 IOPS for volumes >= 534 GiB), it might not be enough if the bottleneck is severe, and it's less direct than provisioning specific IOPS with io2.
- D. S3 is object storage, not block storage like EBS; migrating report data there would require significant application re-architecture and wouldn't solve the live application's I/O needs for its working data.
EBS Volume Types for Performance
Different Amazon EBS volume types offer varying levels of performance (IOPS, throughput) and cost. gp2/gp3 are general purpose, while io1/io2 are Provisioned IOPS for high-performance, I/O-intensive workloads.
- gp2: General purpose, scales 3 IOPS/GiB, up to 16,000 IOPS, burstable.
- io1/io2: Provisioned IOPS, guarantees consistent performance, much higher IOPS (up to 64,000 for io2, 256,000 for io2 Block Express).
- io2 is the latest generation of Provisioned IOPS, offering higher durability and IOPS/GiB than io1.
- Choosing the right volume type is critical for performance-sensitive applications.
Memory trick: gp2's good, but for max speed, io2's the EBS type you need!