AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
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A company has migrated a two-tier application from its on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud. The data tier is a Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS for Oracle with 12 TB of General Purpose SSD Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage. The application is designed to process and store documents in the database as binary large objects (blobs) with an average document size of 6 MB.
The database size has grown over time, reducing the performance and increasing the cost of storage. The company must improve the database performance and needs a solution that is highly available and resilient.
Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
Other
Community
UAnonymous
A
Reduce the RDS DB instance size. Increase the storage capacity to 24 TiB. Change the storage type to Magnetic.
B
Increase the RDS DB instance size. Increase the storage capacity to 24 TiB. Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS.
C
Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Update the application to store documents in the S3 bucket. Store the object metadata in the existing database.
D
Create an Amazon DynamoDB table. Update the application to use DynamoDB. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate data from the Oracle database to DynamoDB.
Explanation:
Explanation
Correct Answer: C
Why Option C is the best solution:
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Cost-effectiveness: Storing large binary objects (BLOBs) in Amazon S3 is significantly cheaper than storing them in RDS. S3 offers much lower storage costs per GB compared to RDS EBS storage.
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Performance improvement: By moving 6MB documents out of the database, you reduce the database size dramatically, which improves:
- Query performance
- Backup and restore times
- Storage I/O operations
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High availability and resilience:
- Amazon S3 provides 99.999999999% (11 9's) durability
- S3 is highly available across multiple Availability Zones
- The existing RDS Multi-AZ deployment remains for metadata storage
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Architectural best practice: This follows the AWS best practice of using the right storage service for the right data type:
- S3: For large, unstructured objects (documents, images, videos)
- RDS: For structured, transactional metadata
Why other options are not optimal:
Option A: Reducing instance size and using Magnetic storage would degrade performance significantly. Magnetic storage has the lowest performance characteristics and would make the database slower.
Option B: Increasing instance size and using Provisioned IOPS would improve performance but would be very expensive, especially with 24TB of Provisioned IOPS storage. This doesn't address the root cause of storing large BLOBs in the database.
Option D: Migrating to DynamoDB would be complex, expensive, and may not be suitable for the existing application's data model. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that may not support all the relational features the application needs, and the migration would be disruptive.
Key AWS Concepts:
- RDS Storage Types: General Purpose SSD (balanced), Provisioned IOPS SSD (high performance), Magnetic (lowest cost, lowest performance)
- S3 for BLOB storage: Ideal for storing large objects like documents, images, and videos
- Database optimization: Offloading large objects from databases improves performance and reduces costs
- Multi-tier storage architecture: Using different storage services for different data types optimizes both cost and performance
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