Question

Reporters at a news agency upload/download video files (about 500MB each) to/from an S3 bucket as part of their daily work. As the agency has started offices in remote locations, it has resulted in poor latency for uploading and accessing data to/from S3. The agency wants to continue using S3 but wants to improve the performance.

As a solutions architect, which of the following solutions do you propose to address this issue? (Select two)
a. Move S3 data into EFS file system created in a US region, connect to EFS file system from EC2 instances in other AWS regions using an inter-region VPC peering connection
b. Use Amazon CloudFront distribution with origin as the S3 bucket. This would speed up uploads as well as downloads for the video files (Correct)
c. Create new S3 buckets in every region where the agency has a remote office, so that each office can maintain its storage for the media assets
d. Enable Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration for the S3 bucket. This would speed up uploads as well as downloads for the video files (Correct)
e. Spin up EC2 instances in each region where the agency has a remote office. Create a daily job to transfer S3 data into EBS volumes attached to the EC2 instances

Answer 1

To address high-latency issues with S3 in remote locations, a solutions architect should recommend using Amazon CloudFront to improve download speeds and enable S3 Transfer Acceleration for faster uploads, rather than creating separate S3 buckets or transferring data to EFS or EC2 instances.

Step-by-step explanation:

When dealing with high-latency issues while uploading and downloading large files to and from an Amazon S3 bucket, especially when operating in remote locations, there are a couple of AWS services that can be employed to improve performance. First, the use of Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network that caches content at edge locations closer to the end-users, can significantly speed up the download of the media files. Secondly, enabling S3 Transfer Acceleration is an effective way to increase upload speeds. This service optimizes the transfer of files to the S3 bucket by routing the traffic through Amazon's globally distributed edge locations.

However, creating separate S3 buckets in every region or moving data to an EFS file system are not advisable in this scenario. More efficient solutions like CloudFront deliver content efficiently globally without the need to maintain separate storage. Utilizing EC2 instances to transfer data to EBS volumes is an unnecessary complication when CloudFront and S3 Transfer Acceleration can address the latency issue directly.