Enhancing Amazon EFS Performance for Mission-Critical Applications

Optimizing Application Performance with Amazon EFS

Question

A global digital enterprise is using Amazon EFS for storing data of a mission-critical application.

Recently, the application has been facing performance issues with Amazon EFS.

Management is seeking your advice to suggest options to optimize application performance. Which of the following can be recommended to enhance application performance?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Correct Answer: B.

Amazon EFS can be accessed concurrently by multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

Parallelizing application across multiple Amazon EC2 instances leads to access data from Amazon EFS together increasing throughput & in turn enhancing performance.

Option A is incorrect as disabling encryption in transit does not have any impact on Amazon EFS performance.

There is very minimal impact on I/O latency & performance when encryption is enabled or disabled with Amazon EFS.

Option C is incorrect as applications need not be installed on EBS optimized Amazon EC2 instances to enhance performance with Amazon EFS.

While considering Amazon EC2 instance for application using Amazon EFS, instance size should be selected based upon the resource requirement of the application.

Option D is incorrect as throughput for Amazon EFS increases when average I/O size increases, not decreases.

For more information on Amazon EFS Performance, refer to the following URL,

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/performance-tips.html

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is a fully managed service that provides scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances. EFS is designed to support a broad range of workloads, including big data and analytics, media processing workflows, content management, web serving, and home directories. However, if an application experiences performance issues while using Amazon EFS, there are several options to optimize its performance.

Let's evaluate each answer option:

A. Use an application that does not use encryption in transit while communicating with Amazon EFS.

This option is incorrect because encryption in transit is a best practice for securing data in transit. Disabling encryption in transit is not recommended as it would put the data at risk.

B. Parallelize applications across multiple Amazon EC2 instances.

This option is a valid solution to improve application performance. Parallelizing the application across multiple EC2 instances will distribute the workload and reduce the load on a single instance. It can help to achieve better performance by using multiple EC2 instances in parallel.

C. Use EBS optimized Amazon EC2 instance for deploying applications.

This option is also a valid solution to improve application performance. EBS optimized instances provide additional network bandwidth to EBS volumes and can lead to improved performance for EFS since it uses EBS as its storage layer. By using an EBS optimized instance, the application can take advantage of the additional network bandwidth available for the EBS volumes.

D. Minimize the I/O size of the application which will lead to an increase in throughput.

This option is partially correct. Minimizing the I/O size can lead to an increase in throughput. However, minimizing the I/O size can also lead to an increase in the number of requests, which can negatively impact performance. The correct approach would be to optimize the I/O size to find the optimal balance between the number of requests and the amount of data transferred in each request.

In conclusion, the recommended options to optimize application performance with Amazon EFS are to parallelize applications across multiple Amazon EC2 instances and to use an EBS optimized Amazon EC2 instance for deploying applications.