SAA-C03 Question 71
Single answerA company is hosting a web application on an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The company wants to ensure that the application can scale to meet sudden spikes in traffic while maintaining high availability and minimizing costs. Which configuration change would best meet this requirement?
- A
Configure the Auto Scaling group with a target tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
- B
Increase the minimum number of instances in the Auto Scaling group to handle peak traffic at all times.
- C
Use a Network Load Balancer (NLB) instead of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to improve performance.
- D
Manually adjust the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group during peak traffic hours.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Configuring a target tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization allows the Auto Scaling group to dynamically and automatically scale in or out depending on the current workload. This approach ensures that the web application can handle sudden traffic spikes while maintaining cost efficiency, as instances are added or removed only when necessary. The other options either lead to higher costs, miss critical application-level functionality, or require manual intervention, which is not ideal for scalability and high availability.
- A. Correct.
Using a target tracking scaling policy allows the Auto Scaling group to dynamically adjust the number of instances based on CPU utilization, ensuring the application scales automatically and cost-effectively.
- B. Incorrect.
Increasing the minimum number of instances ensures availability but leads to higher costs as instances run continuously, even during periods of low traffic.
- C. Incorrect.
An NLB is designed for handling high-performance use cases with TCP/UDP traffic, but does not provide application-level routing or features like ALB, which are crucial for web applications.
- D. Incorrect.
Manually adjusting the desired capacity introduces operational overhead and does not provide the automatic scaling required to handle sudden traffic spikes efficiently.