SAP-C02 Question 361
Select 3A company has a web application running in an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores static assets in an Amazon S3 bucket and uses an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database for persistent storage. Over time, the company has observed increased latency during peak usage hours and higher operational costs. As a Solutions Architect, how can you improve the existing architecture to enhance performance and reduce costs?
- A
Enable Amazon CloudFront for the S3 bucket to cache static assets closer to users.
- B
Migrate the Amazon RDS database to Amazon DynamoDB for better scalability.
- C
Implement AWS Auto Scaling policies based on custom CloudWatch metrics to optimize EC2 instance scaling.
- D
Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer for lower latency.
- E
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequently accessed database queries.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C, E
Explanation
To improve the architecture, several optimizations can be made. Using Amazon CloudFront for caching static assets reduces latency and costs. Implementing custom scaling policies ensures that EC2 instances scale appropriately to handle peak traffic while optimizing costs. Additionally, caching frequently accessed data with Amazon ElastiCache offloads read operations from the database, improving performance and reducing costs. Together, these changes address the observed latency issues and high operational costs.
- A. Correct.
Enabling Amazon CloudFront reduces latency for static assets by caching them closer to end users, improving performance during peak traffic and reducing S3 retrieval costs.
- B. Incorrect.
While Amazon DynamoDB is scalable, it is not a direct replacement for Amazon RDS and might require significant application changes. This option is not ideal unless the application is already designed for DynamoDB.
- C. Correct.
Using AWS Auto Scaling policies and custom CloudWatch metrics can help optimize instance scaling, ensuring that resources match demand, reducing both latency and operational costs.
- D. Incorrect.
Replacing the ALB with a Network Load Balancer is not appropriate in this case because the application requires HTTP/HTTPS-specific features that ALB provides, such as path-based routing and host-based routing.
- E. Correct.
Implementing Amazon ElastiCache allows caching of frequently accessed queries, reducing database load, improving response times, and lowering costs by reducing database resource consumption.