SAP-C02 Question 367
Select 3A company is hosting a multi-tier web application on AWS with an Auto Scaling group for the application servers and an Amazon RDS instance for the database. The application experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during specific hours and the company wants to ensure that the architecture automatically scales to handle these spikes without overprovisioning resources. The company also wants to minimize costs. Which combination of steps would you recommend to achieve these requirements?
- A
Configure the Auto Scaling group with a target tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
- B
Use Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments to scale the database horizontally.
- C
Enable Amazon RDS storage autoscaling for the database.
- D
Set up AWS Application Auto Scaling to scale the RDS instance based on the read and write IOPS metrics.
- E
Configure the Auto Scaling group with scheduled scaling policies for predictable traffic spikes.
- F
Use Reserved Instances for the Auto Scaling group's EC2 instances to reduce costs.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C, E
Explanation
To handle unpredictable traffic spikes, the architecture should dynamically scale the application servers using a target tracking scaling policy. Scheduled scaling can be added to handle predictable spikes efficiently. For the database, enabling storage autoscaling ensures that the system handles storage needs during peak loads without manual intervention. These combined steps optimize performance and minimize costs by matching resources to demand while avoiding overprovisioning.
- A. Correct.
Correct: A target tracking scaling policy adjusts the number of instances dynamically based on the load (e.g., CPU utilization), which helps handle traffic spikes efficiently without overprovisioning.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect: Amazon RDS Multi-AZ is designed for high availability and disaster recovery, not horizontal scaling. Horizontal scaling of RDS typically requires read replicas, which is not mentioned here.
- C. Correct.
Correct: Amazon RDS storage autoscaling can automatically scale the storage capacity of the database, ensuring it can handle sudden spikes in demand without manually provisioning additional storage.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect: AWS Application Auto Scaling does not directly support scaling Amazon RDS instances. RDS vertical scaling typically requires changing the instance class and cannot be done dynamically.
- E. Correct.
Correct: Scheduled scaling allows you to proactively scale out or in based on predictable traffic patterns, which helps optimize costs and performance during known spikes.
- F. Incorrect.
Incorrect: Reserved Instances are not relevant for handling unpredictable traffic spikes as they are designed for steady-state workloads. Spot or On-Demand instances with Auto Scaling are more appropriate for such scenarios.