A county document-management database on Amazon EC2 needs sustained IOPS and throughput for peak scanning days without overpaying for idle capacity overnight. Which block-storage design best meets performance and cost goals?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think of EBS like choosing the right truck for scanning day—match volume type and provisioned IOPS/throughput to real metrics, not folklore. Oversizing io2 forever or parking an OLTP DB on cold HDD or S3 object GETs is how budgets and SLAs both get hurt.
Full Explanation
Matching Amazon EBS volume type and provisioned performance to measured demand is how a county document database sustains peak scanning IOPS without paying for idle overnight capacity. gp3 lets architects set IOPS and throughput independently of size; io2 is appropriate when latency-sensitive database ceilings exceed gp3, but both should be baselined from CloudWatch volume metrics and growth plans rather than folklore maximums. That design works because block storage for an OLTP municipal document store must be durable, predictable, and right-sized—performance is purchased where metrics justify it, then reduced or avoided when workload falls. Using only instance store fails conceptually because ephemeral disks lose documents when the instance stops or fails, which is unacceptable for county records that must survive host replacement. A single cold HDD sc1 volume fails because sc1 targets infrequent sequential throughput, not random transactional IOPS typical of document OLTP, so scanning-day latency and queue depth suffer. Placing classic RDBMS data files on S3 Standard over the internet fails because S3 is object storage, not a block device; per-transaction object access adds latency, consistency, and networking anti-patterns. Exam caveat: gp3 provisioned IOPS still have service ceilings and multi-volume striping or io2 may be required for extreme peaks—do not assume one default volume type fits every county database. Operational check: capture VolumeReadOps/WriteOps, QueueLength, and throughput for a full scanning week, map peaks to gp3 or io2 settings, document overnight idle utilization, and set a quarterly rightsizing review before renewing Provisioned IOPS commitments.