AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
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A company wants to improve its ability to clone large amounts of production data into a test environment in the same AWS Region. The data is stored in Amazon EC2 instances on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes. Modifications to the cloned data must not affect the production environment. The software that accesses this data requires consistently high I/O performance.
A solutions architect needs to minimize the time that is required to clone the production data into the test environment.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
Other
Community
UAnonymous
A
Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Restore the snapshots onto EC2 instance store volumes in the test environment.
B
Configure the production EBS volumes to use the EBS Multi-Attach feature. Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Attach the production EBS volumes to the EC2 instances in the test environment.
C
Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Create and initialize new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment before restoring the volumes from the production EBS snapshots.
D
Take EBS snapshots of the production EBS volumes. Turn on the EBS fast snapshot restore feature on the EBS snapshots. Restore the snapshots into new EBS volumes. Attach the new EBS volumes to EC2 instances in the test environment.
Explanation:
Explanation
Correct Answer: D
Why Option D is correct:
- EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) significantly reduces the time required to restore EBS snapshots to new volumes by eliminating the need for lazy loading. Without FSR, when you restore a snapshot, the data is lazily loaded from S3 to the EBS volume as blocks are accessed, which can cause poor initial performance.
- FSR pre-warms the volume by loading all data blocks immediately upon restoration, providing consistently high I/O performance from the start.
- The solution maintains data isolation - production data is cloned via snapshots, and new EBS volumes are created for the test environment, ensuring modifications don't affect production.
- This approach minimizes cloning time by using FSR to accelerate the restoration process.
Why other options are incorrect:
A: Instance store volumes
- Instance store volumes are ephemeral and data is lost when the instance stops or terminates
- They cannot be restored from EBS snapshots directly
- Not suitable for persistent test environment data
B: EBS Multi-Attach feature
- This would attach the same production volumes to test instances, violating the requirement that modifications must not affect production
- Multi-Attach allows multiple instances to access the same volume simultaneously, which would create data consistency issues
- Doesn't create an isolated clone of the data
C: Create and initialize new volumes before restoring
- This approach still uses standard snapshot restoration which involves lazy loading
- The initialization step is unnecessary and doesn't improve performance
- Without FSR, the restored volumes would have poor initial I/O performance as data is loaded on-demand
Key AWS Services & Features:
- EBS Snapshots: Point-in-time backups stored in S3
- EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR): Premium feature that eliminates lazy loading by pre-warming restored volumes
- EBS Multi-Attach: Allows a single EBS volume to be attached to multiple EC2 instances (only for io2 Block Express volumes)
Best Practice: For cloning production data to test environments while maintaining isolation and performance, use EBS snapshots with Fast Snapshot Restore enabled for the fastest restoration with immediate high performance.
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