AWS S3 Performance Optimization Tips

Optimizing Performance for Increased AWS S3 GET Requests

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Question

Your team has an application being served out of AWS S3

There is a surge of increased number of GET requests.

After monitoring using Cloudwatch metrics, you can see the rate of GET requests going close to 5000 requests per second.

Which of the following can be used to ensure better performance?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - C.

The AWS Documentation mentions the following.

If your workload is mainly sending GET requests, in addition to the preceding guidelines, you should consider using Amazon CloudFront for performance optimization.

By integrating CloudFront with Amazon S3, you can distribute content to your users with low latency and a high data transfer rate.

You also send fewer direct requests to Amazon S3, which reduces your costs.

Since the documentation clearly mentions this, all other options are invalid.

For more information, please check the below link.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/s3-dg.pdf

The best option to improve the performance of the application being served out of AWS S3 in response to a surge of increased number of GET requests is to place a CloudFront distribution in front of the S3 bucket. The reasons for this are explained below:

A. Adding an Elasticache in front of the S3 bucket: ElastiCache is a web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. It is useful in reducing the load on databases by caching the frequently accessed data in memory, thereby improving the performance of the application. However, in this scenario, adding Elasticache in front of the S3 bucket would not help much since S3 is already a highly scalable and reliable object storage service designed for high durability, availability, and performance at scale. Elasticache can improve performance for read-heavy database workloads but won't have much of an effect on S3 access.

B. Using DynamoDB instead of using S3: DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that can handle millions of requests per second and automatically scales capacity to meet the demands of the workload. However, this option won't help either since DynamoDB is a database service that stores and retrieves structured data, whereas S3 is a simple storage service that stores and retrieves any type of data. The option to choose between S3 and DynamoDB depends on the type of data and the specific needs of the application.

C. Placing a Cloudfront distribution in front of the S3 bucket: Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, and no minimum usage commitments. CloudFront caches content at edge locations around the world, reducing the latency of the GET requests, and improving the overall performance of the application. Cloudfront also supports SSL/TLS encryption, which helps to protect sensitive data in transit. Placing a CloudFront distribution in front of the S3 bucket will help to distribute the traffic and reduce the load on S3. It can also help to mitigate DDoS attacks.

D. Placing an Elastic Load balancer in front of the S3 bucket: Elastic Load Balancer is a load balancing service that automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones. It helps to improve the availability and scalability of applications by automatically detecting unhealthy targets and rerouting traffic to healthy targets. However, this option is not suitable for S3, since S3 is an object storage service, and Elastic Load Balancer is designed for distributing traffic to compute resources like EC2 instances or containers.

Therefore, the correct answer is C. Placing a CloudFront distribution in front of the S3 bucket.