A company is building an image service on the web that will allow users to upload and search random photos. At peak usage, up to 10,000 users worldwide will upload their images. The service will…

Amazon EFS is a regional network file system designed for shared access by EC2 instances, which is not an optimal or scalable solution for direct user uploads from a web application or for global access, nor is it serverless.

While using SQS and a fleet of EC2 instances is a viable pattern, it involves managing EC2 instances (scaling, patching, maintenance), which leads to higher operational overhead and potentially higher costs compared to the fully serverless Lambda-based image processing in option C, especially for sporadic workloads.

Storing uploaded images in Amazon S3 provides highly scalable, durable, and globally accessible storage. Configuring an S3 bucket event to invoke an AWS Lambda function creates a serverless, event-driven architecture where Lambda automatically scales to process image text overlays, and the processed images can be stored back in S3, minimizing operational overhead and perfectly handling varying workloads.

Amazon EBS volumes are block storage attached to a single EC2 instance within an Availability Zone and are not designed for direct user uploads from a global web service or for highly scalable, shared image storage across multiple regions.