SAP-C02 Question 185
Select 2A company is running a multi-tier web application on AWS. The application consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributing traffic to multiple Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. The company is experiencing intermittent high latency and occasional 5xx errors during peak traffic times. Upon investigation, it is found that the issue is related to the backend servers struggling under load. As a solutions architect, what combination of solutions should you implement to address this issue effectively?
- A
Enable ALB's slow start mode to give new EC2 instances time to warm up before handling requests.
- B
Increase the Auto Scaling group's maximum instance count and configure a scaling policy based on average CPU utilization.
- C
Enable HTTP/2 on the ALB to optimize client-server communication and reduce latency.
- D
Configure ALB health checks to remove unhealthy EC2 instances from the backend pool.
- E
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to optimize database connections and reduce the load on backend EC2 instances.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, B
Explanation
The problem described involves backend servers struggling under load, leading to high latency and 5xx errors. Enabling slow start mode on the ALB ensures that new EC2 instances are not immediately overwhelmed, while increasing the Auto Scaling group's instance count and configuring a scaling policy ensures sufficient capacity during peak traffic. The other options either don't address the root cause or are unrelated to the issue.
- A. Correct.
Enabling slow start mode on the ALB allows new EC2 instances to gradually ramp up the number of requests they handle, preventing them from being overwhelmed immediately. This is effective in handling high traffic scenarios.
- B. Correct.
Increasing the Auto Scaling group's maximum instance count and using a scaling policy based on CPU utilization ensures additional instances are launched during peak traffic to handle the increased load.
- C. Incorrect.
While enabling HTTP/2 on the ALB can improve client-server communication efficiency, it does not directly address backend server load issues, which is the root cause of the problem.
- D. Incorrect.
Configuring ALB health checks is important for ensuring only healthy instances serve traffic, but it does not address the issue of backend servers being overwhelmed, which is causing the latency and errors.
- E. Incorrect.
Amazon RDS Proxy is useful for optimizing database connections, but the question specifies that the issue is with the backend EC2 instances, not the database.