Determine High Performing And / Or Scalable Storage Solutions

Exam Guide: Solutions Architect - Associate
⚡ Domain 3: Design High-Performing Architectures
📘 Task Statement 3.1

🎯 Determining High Performing And / Or Scalable Storage Solutions is about picking the right storage for the workload so it is:

1 Fast enough
2 Scalable
3 Cost-appropriate
4 Operationally simple

Choose storage by access pattern first (object/file/block), then by performance, then by scale/cost, then by hybrid needs.

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Knowledge

1 | Storage Types And Their Characteristics

Object Storage (Amazon S3)

Best for:

• Static assets, backups, logs, data lakes, media, artifacts
• Massive scale and very high durability

Characteristics:
1 Access via HTTP API (not POSIX)
2 Not a traditional mounted filesystem
3 Performance scales with request patterns, designed for throughput

File Storage (Amazon EFS)

Best for:

• Shared filesystem for multiple EC2 instances/containers
• Linux POSIX-style applications that need a mounted NFS filesystem

Characteristics:
1 Regional, multi-AZ (designed for high availability within a Region)
2 Scales automatically (elastic capacity)
3 Performance modes and throughput modes affect performance/cost

Block Storage (Amazon EBS)

Best for:

• Low-latency storage attached to EC2
• Databases or transactional workloads on EC2 (high IOPS needs)
• Boot volumes

Characteristics:
1 A volume is attached to one instance at a time (generally)
2 Choose volume type for performance (gp3/io1/io2, etc.)
3 Snapshots stored in S3 for durability/backup

2 | Storage Services With Appropriate Use Cases

1 If it’s object storage → S3
2 If it’s a shared Linux filesystem → EFS
3 If it’s single-instance low-latency disk → EBS

3 | Hybrid Storage Solutions To Meet Business Requirements

Hybrid storage matters when:
1 You have on-prem apps that need cloud storage
2 You want backup/archive to AWS
3 You need low-latency local access but cloud durability/scale

Common AWS hybrid options:

• AWS Storage Gateway: file, volume, tape gateways
• AWS DataSyncL accelerated data transfer + scheduling
• AWS Transfer Family: managed SFTP/FTPS into S3/EFS
• AWS Snowball/Snowcone: large offline migrations

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Skills

A | Determine Storage Services And Configurations That Meet Performance Demands

Performance drivers you should recognize

1 Latency: how fast a single read/write completes

2 IOPS: how many small operations per second (common for DB workloads)

3 Throughput: MB/s or GB/s (common for streaming, big files, analytics)

4 Concurrency: many clients at once (file shares, web apps, microservices)

Common Patterns

• “Database on EC2 needs high IOPS” → EBS io2/io1 (or gp3 with provisioned IOPS if suitable)
• “Many instances need shared access to same files” → EFS
• “Static assets globally distributed” → S3 + CloudFront
• “Very large objects / backup storage” → S3 (possibly lifecycle to Glacier)

B | Determine Storage Services That Can Scale To Accommodate Future Needs

1 S3: essentially unlimited scale for objects
2 EFS: elastically scales capacity automatically
3 EBS: can modify volumes (size/type) but still tied to EC2 and AZ

“Expect rapid data growth” → S3/EFS are typical answers because scaling is built in.

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Cheat Sheet

Requirement	Storage
Store and retrieve any amount of unstructured data	S3
Shared filesystem for many Linux servers	EFS
Lowest-latency disk for EC2 instance	EBS
High IOPS for database on EC2	EBS io2/io1 (or tuned gp3)
Static content served globally	S3 + CloudFront
On-prem apps need cloud-backed storage	Storage Gateway
Fast recurring data transfer to AWS	DataSync
SFTP uploads into AWS storage	Transfer Family → S3/EFS

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Recap Checklist ✅

1. [ ] I can choose object vs file vs block storage based on access pattern
2. [ ] I know when to use S3, EFS, and EBS (and why)
3. [ ] I can match performance needs to storage configuration (IOPS vs throughput vs latency)
4. [ ] I can identify when hybrid storage is required (Storage Gateway / DataSync / Transfer Family)
5. [ ] I choose services that scale with growth (S3/EFS) without major redesign

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AWS Whitepapers and Official Documentation

These are the primary AWS documents behind Task Statement 3.1

You do not need to memorize them, use them to understand how to determine high performing and scalable storage solutions.

Core storage services

1. Amazon S3
2. Amazon EFS

3. Amazon EBS
4. EBS volume types

Hybrid storage and transfer

1. AWS Storage Gateway
2. AWS DataSync
3. AWS Transfer Family

Performance At The Edge (common pairing with S3)

Amazon CloudFront

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