SAA-C03 Q573 · Networking

Question

A company is deploying an application that processes streaming data in near-real time. The company plans to use Amazon EC2 instances for the workload. The network architecture must be configurable to provide the lowest possible latency between nodes. Which networking solution meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

**Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)** is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale. EFA provides **OS-bypass** capabilities, which allows the application to communicate directly with the network hardware, bypassing the operating system kernel. This dramatically reduces latency and increases throughput between instances.

**Step-by-step why this is correct:**
1. **Requirement: Lowest possible latency between nodes** — EFA is specifically designed for this. It supports the **libfabric API** (based on the OpenFabrics Interfaces specification), enabling direct hardware-level communication.
2. **Requirement: Configurable network architecture** — EFA is attached to EC2 instances as an additional

📖 Explanation

✅ Correct Answer

❌ Wrong Answers

📘 Key Concepts

🏗️ Architecture

⚙️ Operations

💰 Cost

🎯 Exam Tips