Learn why deploying high-performance computing (HPC) applications across multiple AWS Availability Zones ensures fault tolerance, automatic failover, and minimal latency. Essential for AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam success.
Table of Contents
Question
A company wants to migrate its high-performance computing (HPC) application to Amazon EC2 instances. The application has multiple components and must have fault tolerance and automatic failover capabilities. Which AWS infrastructure solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST latency between components?
A. Multiple AWS Regions
B. Multiple edge locations
C. Multiple Availability Zones
D. Regional edge caches
Answer
Deploying an HPC application across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within a single AWS Region is the best solution to meet the requirements of fault tolerance, automatic failover, and low latency.
C. Multiple Availability Zones
Explanation
Using EC2 instances in multiple Availability Zones is an AWS infrastructure solution that meets the requirements of migrating a high-performance computing (HPC) application to AWS with fault tolerance and failover capabilities, and with the least latency between components.
Why Multiple Availability Zones?
- Fault Tolerance: AZs are physically isolated data centers within an AWS Region, designed to operate independently. By distributing application components across multiple AZs, the system can continue functioning even if one AZ experiences a failure. This ensures high availability and fault tolerance.
- Automatic Failover: AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and Auto Scaling support automatic failover between AZs. For example, if one AZ goes down, traffic is redirected to healthy instances in other AZs without manual intervention.
- Low Latency: Since AZs within the same Region are connected by high-speed, low-latency networking, communication between components remains fast and efficient. This is critical for HPC applications that require rapid data exchange between instances.
- Cost Efficiency: Using multiple AZs avoids the higher costs and complexities associated with cross-Region deployments while still providing redundancy and resilience.
Why Not the Other Options?
A. Multiple AWS Regions: While using multiple Regions provides disaster recovery benefits, it introduces higher latency due to the geographic distance between Regions. This makes it unsuitable for tightly coupled HPC workloads.
B. Multiple Edge Locations: Edge locations are part of AWS’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) for caching content closer to users. They are not designed for running compute-intensive workloads or ensuring fault tolerance for applications like HPC.
D. Regional Edge Caches: Similar to edge locations, regional edge caches optimize content delivery but do not support compute workloads or provide fault tolerance for applications.
Best Practices for Multi-AZ Deployments
- Use Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to distribute traffic across instances in different AZs.
- Enable Auto Scaling to dynamically adjust capacity based on demand.
- Leverage services like Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ deployments for database redundancy.
- Implement health checks and monitoring using Amazon CloudWatch to ensure system reliability.
By leveraging multiple Availability Zones, you can achieve a robust architecture that balances performance, fault tolerance, and cost efficiency—making it the optimal choice for HPC applications in AWS environments.
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