SAA-C03 Question 282
Single answerYour company runs an e-commerce application on AWS, using an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). To improve the performance of the application during high traffic periods, you decide to implement caching. Which solution would be the most cost-effective and scalable way to achieve this?
- A
Enable caching on the Application Load Balancer.
- B
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed data.
- C
Increase the size of the EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group.
- D
Store cached data in Amazon S3 and serve it directly to users.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
The most cost-effective and scalable option to improve application performance during high traffic periods is to use Amazon ElastiCache. It provides in-memory caching for frequently accessed data, reducing the load on your back-end infrastructure and improving response times. Other options, such as increasing EC2 instance sizes or using S3, do not address the specific need for dynamic caching effectively.
- A. Incorrect.
Application Load Balancers do not have built-in caching capabilities. They primarily distribute traffic to back-end targets based on routing rules.
- B. Correct.
Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed caching solution that integrates seamlessly with AWS services. It supports in-memory caching, which can significantly improve performance and reduce load on the database.
- C. Incorrect.
Increasing the size of EC2 instances can improve performance but is not cost-effective or scalable compared to implementing a caching layer.
- D. Incorrect.
While Amazon S3 can store static assets, it is not ideal for dynamic or frequently accessed data that requires low latency. ElastiCache is a better fit for this use case.