Question

A cloud engineer deploys an analytics application on a fleet of VMs that write intermediate processing results to a locally attached instance store volume. After a routine maintenance event forces several VMs to stop and start, users report that previously completed job results are missing, though the application itself restarts normally. Application and network logs show no errors. What is the MOST likely root cause of the missing data?

Accepted Answer

The instance store is ephemeral, so data written to it is lost when the underlying VM is stopped and restarted on new host hardware.

Answer

The security group rules were reset during the maintenance event, blocking access to the stored results.

Answer

The object storage lifecycle policy expired and permanently deleted the intermediate results.

Answer

The IAM role attached to the VMs lost read permissions to the storage volume after the restart.