Questions 1 to 3

Question 1

A company runs a streaming media service, and the content is stored on Amazon S3. The media catalog server pulls updated content from S3 and can issue over 1 million read operations per second for short periods. Latency must be kept under 5ms for these updates. Which solution will provide the best performance for the media catalog updates?

1. Update the application code to use an Amazon ElastiCache for the Redis cluster.
2. Implement Amazon CloudFront and cache the content at Edge locations.
3. Update the application code to use an Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator cluster.
4. Implement an Instance store volume on the media catalog server.

Correct Answer: 1

Explanation: Some applications (such as media catalog updates) require high-frequency reads and consistent throughput. For such applications, S3 is often complemented with an in-memory cache (such as Amazon ElastiCache for Redis) to reduce the S3 retrieval cost and to improve performance. ElastiCache for Redis is a fully managed, in-memory data store that provides sub-millisecond latency performance with high throughput. ElastiCache for Redis complements S3 in the following ways:

• Redis stores data in-memory, so it provides sub-millisecond latency and supports incredibly high requests per second.
• It supports key/value based operations that map well to S3 operations (for example, GET/SET => GET/PUT), making it easy to write code for both S3 and ElastiCache.
• It can be implemented as an application side cache. This allows you to use S3 as your persistent store and benefit from its durability, availability, and low cost. Your applications decide what objects to cache, when to cache them, and how to cache them. In this example, the media catalog is pulling updates from S3, so the performance between these components is what needs to be improved. Therefore, using ElastiCache to cache the content will dramatically increase the performance.

CORRECT: “Update the application code to use an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster.” is the correct answer.

INCORRECT: “Implement Amazon CloudFront and cache the content at Edge locations.” is incorrect. CloudFront is good for getting media closer to users but in this case, we’re trying to improve performance within the data center by moving data from S3 to the media catalog server.

INCORRECT: “Update the application code to use an Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator cluster.” is incorrect. DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is used with DynamoDB but is unsuitable for use with Amazon S3.

INCORRECT: “Implement an Instance store volume on the media catalog server.” is incorrect. This will improve local disk performance but will not improve reads from Amazon S3.

References: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/turbocharge-amazon-s3-with-amazon-elasticache-for-redis/