A company recently deployed MySQL on an Amazon EC2 instance with a default boot volume. The company intends to restore a 1.75 TB database. A SysOps administrator needs to provision the correct…

Question

Options

• ADeploy a 2 TB Cold HDD (sc1) volume.
• BDeploy a 2 TB Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) volume.
• CDeploy a 2 TB General Purpose SSD (gp3) volume. Set the IOPS to 10,000.
• DDeploy a 2 TB Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume. Set the IOPS to 10,000.

• A
  3% (1)
• B
  10% (3)
• C
  71% (22)
• D
  16% (5)

Explanation

gp3 (General Purpose SSD) is the right choice because it supports up to 16,000 IOPS and allows you to independently provision exactly 10,000 IOPS at a lower cost than io2 - you pay for only the storage and the IOPS you configure, without over-provisioning.

Why the distractors fail:

• A (sc1 / Cold HDD): Designed for infrequently accessed workloads with a max of 250 IOPS - nowhere near the 10,000 IOPS required.
• B (st1 / Throughput Optimized HDD): Optimized for sequential throughput (e.g., big data, log processing), not random I/O; max IOPS is only 500.
• D (io2 / Provisioned IOPS SSD): Can absolutely deliver 10,000 IOPS, but io2 carries a significantly higher per-GB and per-IOPS cost than gp3, making it the wrong choice when the question asks for lowest cost.

Memory tip: Think of it this way - io2 is for extreme, mission-critical IOPS (think financial databases needing 64,000+ IOPS or sub-millisecond latency SLAs). For anything under ~16,000 IOPS that doesn't have strict latency guarantees in writing, gp3 is almost always the cost-winner on the exam.

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