CLF-C02 Practice Question 8: Shared File Storage
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 1 · question 8 of 10
Several Linux EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group must read and write the same set of files concurrently through a standard file system interface, and the storage must grow and shrink automatically as files are added and removed. Which AWS storage service meets these requirements?
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Answer:
Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) provides a serverless, elastic NFS file system that many Linux EC2 instances can mount and access at the same time, growing and shrinking automatically as files are added and removed, with no capacity to provision.
Option B, Amazon EBS, is block storage; a General Purpose or Provisioned IOPS volume is normally attached to one instance in one Availability Zone, and while Multi-Attach exists for some io volumes it is limited to one Availability Zone and requires a cluster-aware file system, not a general answer for an Auto Scaling group. Option C, Amazon S3, is object storage accessed over an API rather than a mounted file system, so applications expecting POSIX file semantics would have to be rewritten. Option D, instance store, is ephemeral disk physically attached to one host: it is not shared and its data is lost when the instance stops or terminates.
Reference: What is Amazon Elastic File System?