AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Practice Exam

Which networking feature is most beneficial for a clustered computing application requiring low latency?

1. Elastic Load Balancing

2. Public IP addressing

3. Placement groups

4. Direct Connect

The correct answer is: Placement groups

Placement groups are specifically designed to optimize network performance among instances within an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment, making them highly beneficial for clustered computing applications that require low latency. When instances are placed within the same placement group, they benefit from high-bandwidth connectivity and very low latency, as they utilize the same underlying hardware. This is particularly critical for clustered applications where rapid data exchange between instances is necessary for performance. By using placement groups, you can minimize latency, which is crucial for workloads such as big data analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), or other applications where response time is critical. In contrast, although other features such as Elastic Load Balancing distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets to optimize resource use and ensure high availability, they do not specifically enhance low-latency communication between instances within a cluster. Public IP addressing facilitates external internet connectivity and is not relevant to latency between instances in a cluster. Direct Connect provides dedicated network connections from your premises to AWS, but it is focused on reducing network costs and increasing bandwidth rather than specifically addressing the low latency requirements of clustered applications.