The core issue is latency and scalability for serving large video files, leading to buffering and timeouts. The most effective solution is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with an optimized origin store. Amazon S3 is designed for durable, scalable, and cost-effective storage of large static objects like videos. Amazon CloudFront, a CDN, caches this content at edge locations globally, significantly reducing latency for users and offloading requests from the origin infrastructure. Migrating videos from EFS to S3 and serving them via CloudFront directly addresses the video buffering problem in the most scalable and cost-efficient manner.

A. Reconfiguring EFS to Max I/O mode might increase throughput but does not solve the fundamental problem of network latency for geographically dispersed users. It is not a cost-effective solution for content delivery.

B. Using instance stores is not appropriate for persistent data like blog content. This approach is operationally complex, introduces a high risk of data loss, and does not solve the content delivery issue.

D. While placing CloudFront in front of the ALB is a valid pattern for caching, it keeps the videos on EFS. S3 is a more performant, scalable, and cost-effective origin for large static media files than EFS.

1. Amazon S3 Documentation: "Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability

data availability

security

and performance... S3 is ideal for a variety of use cases

including... backup and restore

disaster recovery

archive

data lakes

big data analytics

hybrid cloud storage

and cloud-native application data."

Source: AWS Documentation

"What is Amazon S3?"

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Welcome.html

2. Amazon CloudFront Documentation: "Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service... When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront

the user is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay)

so that content is delivered with the best possible performance."

Source: AWS Documentation

"What is Amazon CloudFront?"

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Introduction.html

3. AWS Well-Architected Framework

Performance Efficiency Pillar: "Use a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce latency by serving requests from a location closer to your end users... For static content

you can use Amazon S3 as the origin for Amazon CloudFront."

Source: AWS Well-Architected Framework

Performance Efficiency Pillar Whitepaper

"PERF 7: How do you select the best performing architecture?"

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/performance-efficiency-pillar/select-the-best-performing-architecture.html (Section: Caching)

4. Amazon EFS Documentation: "Amazon EFS is designed to provide massively parallel shared access to thousands of Amazon EC2 instances... Use cases such as lift-and-shift enterprise applications

big data analytics

web serving and content management...". While EFS can be used for web serving

it is not optimized for global

low-latency delivery of large media files compared to the S3 + CloudFront pattern.

Source: AWS Documentation

"What is Amazon Elastic File System?"

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/efs/latest/ug/what-is-efs.html