SAA-C03 Question 222
Select 2A company is running a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application has experienced slow response times during traffic spikes. After analyzing the workload, you discover that the EC2 instances are under heavy CPU utilization during these spikes. How can you design a more high-performing architecture to handle traffic spikes effectively?
- A
Configure Auto Scaling for the EC2 instances to dynamically scale based on CPU utilization metrics.
- B
Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer to decrease latency.
- C
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed data to reduce load on the EC2 instances.
- D
Migrate the application to Amazon S3 for static website hosting.
- E
Enable Elastic Load Balancing cross-zone load balancing to distribute traffic evenly across instances.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C
Explanation
To handle traffic spikes effectively and improve performance, the architecture should include Auto Scaling for dynamic scalability and ElastiCache for offloading frequently accessed data from the EC2 instances. These solutions reduce the computational burden during traffic spikes, ensuring a more responsive and high-performing application.
- A. Correct.
Configuring Auto Scaling allows EC2 instances to scale in or out dynamically based on CPU utilization metrics, which helps handle traffic spikes effectively. This is a key strategy for designing scalable and high-performing architectures.
- B. Incorrect.
Replacing the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer will not directly address the high CPU utilization on the EC2 instances. ALB is already optimized for HTTP/HTTPS applications and is suitable for this use case.
- C. Correct.
Amazon ElastiCache can be used to store and retrieve frequently accessed data, reducing the computational load on EC2 instances and improving application response times during traffic spikes.
- D. Incorrect.
Migrating the application to Amazon S3 is only applicable if the workload is serving static content. Since this scenario involves a web application with dynamic content, this is not a suitable solution.
- E. Incorrect.
Enabling cross-zone load balancing ensures traffic is distributed evenly across instances in multiple Availability Zones, but it does not directly address the high CPU utilization caused by traffic spikes.