SAA-C03 Question 98
Single answerA company is running a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores user-uploaded files in an Amazon S3 bucket. Recently, the company noticed an increase in latency when downloading files from the S3 bucket. As a solutions architect, what should you recommend to minimize download latency for end users?
- A
Enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for the S3 bucket.
- B
Move the files to an Amazon EBS volume attached to the EC2 instances.
- C
Use Amazon CloudFront to cache the files closer to the users.
- D
Enable cross-region replication for the S3 bucket.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C
Explanation
Amazon CloudFront is designed to improve performance by caching content at edge locations closer to users. This reduces latency for downloading files, especially when users are geographically distributed. The other options either address different problems (e.g., disaster recovery) or are not optimal for this specific use case.
- A. Incorrect.
S3 Transfer Acceleration improves upload and download performance by routing data through optimized Amazon CloudFront edge locations. However, it is primarily beneficial for geographically distributed users uploading large files, not for download latency reductions in this scenario.
- B. Incorrect.
Storing files on Amazon EBS is not recommended for static assets like user-uploaded files because it is not scalable and does not address latency for geographically distributed end users.
- C. Correct.
Using Amazon CloudFront to cache the files closer to users is the best solution. CloudFront distributes content through edge locations, minimizing download latency and improving performance for global users.
- D. Incorrect.
Cross-region replication is intended for disaster recovery or compliance purposes and does not directly reduce latency for downloads. It replicates data between buckets in different AWS regions.