DVA-C02 Question 24
Single answerYou are designing an e-commerce application on AWS that processes customer orders. The architecture currently uses an EC2 instance to handle both order validation and payment processing. However, during traffic spikes, the payment processing slows down significantly, impacting the user experience. What approach should you take to address this issue while following best practices for designing loosely coupled systems?
- A
Decouple the components by using an Amazon SQS queue to pass order data from the validation process to the payment processing service.
- B
Increase the instance type of the EC2 instance to handle the increased load during traffic spikes.
- C
Use an Auto Scaling group to add more EC2 instances during high-traffic periods to handle both validation and payment processing.
- D
Migrate the application to a single, larger EC2 instance with higher compute and memory resources.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Loosely coupled architectures are a best practice in AWS to improve scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility. By decoupling the order validation and payment processing components using Amazon SQS, each component can scale independently, preventing bottlenecks during traffic spikes. Tightly coupled architectures, such as running both processes on the same EC2 instance, limit scalability and are prone to failures if one component goes down.
- A. Correct.
This is correct. Using Amazon SQS to decouple the order validation and payment processing allows the two components to operate independently. This ensures that traffic spikes in one component do not overwhelm the other, improving scalability and fault tolerance.
- B. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. While increasing the instance size may temporarily alleviate performance issues, it does not address the underlying tight coupling of the components, which limits scalability and fault tolerance.
- C. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. Although Auto Scaling can handle increased traffic, it still does not resolve the issue of tightly coupled components. Both processes would still run on the same EC2 instance, which can cause bottlenecks.
- D. Incorrect.
This is incorrect. Migrating to a larger EC2 instance does not align with best practices, as it keeps the components tightly coupled and does not improve scalability or fault tolerance.