SAA-C03 Question 219
Select 3A company runs a video streaming platform and is experiencing performance issues during peak traffic hours. Their application is running on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Users are reporting latency and buffering issues. Upon investigation, you find that the EC2 instances are running at maximum capacity during peak times. How can you optimize the architecture to handle the high traffic while minimizing costs?
- A
Enable Auto Scaling for the EC2 instances behind the ALB to dynamically adjust capacity based on demand.
- B
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed data and reduce load on the EC2 instances.
- C
Switch from an Application Load Balancer to a Network Load Balancer for lower latency.
- D
Migrate the video streaming application to AWS Lambda to handle traffic spikes.
- E
Use Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache and deliver video content closer to users.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B, E
Explanation
To design a high-performing architecture for a video streaming platform, it's essential to handle traffic spikes efficiently while minimizing costs. Auto Scaling ensures the backend can scale dynamically to meet demand. Amazon ElastiCache reduces backend load by caching frequently accessed data. Amazon CloudFront improves user experience by caching and delivering content from edge locations, reducing latency and offloading traffic from the origin servers. Switching to a Network Load Balancer or using AWS Lambda are unsuitable for this use case due to the specific requirements of video streaming applications.
- A. Correct.
Correct: Enabling Auto Scaling allows the architecture to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances based on traffic, ensuring sufficient capacity during peak hours while minimizing costs during low-traffic periods.
- B. Correct.
Correct: Using Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed data reduces the load on the EC2 instances, improving performance and reducing latency for users.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect: A Network Load Balancer is not suitable for this use case because it operates at the transport layer (Layer 4) and does not provide features like HTTP-based routing or SSL termination, which are critical for a video streaming platform.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect: AWS Lambda is not ideal for video streaming applications because it has execution time limits (15 minutes) and is not designed for long-lived connections or high-throughput streaming.
- E. Correct.
Correct: Amazon CloudFront as a CDN improves performance by caching video content at edge locations closer to users, reducing latency and offloading traffic from the EC2 instances.