SOA-C02 Question 291
Select 3Your company has an application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) that experiences fluctuating traffic patterns. The application is currently over-provisioned to handle peak traffic, resulting in higher costs. How can you optimize the cost of the application while maintaining performance and availability?
- A
Enable Auto Scaling for the EC2 instances behind the ALB to dynamically adjust capacity based on traffic demand.
- B
Replace the Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer to reduce costs.
- C
Use Spot Instances for non-critical portions of the workload while keeping On-Demand Instances for critical components.
- D
Configure EC2 instance rightsizing recommendations in AWS Cost Explorer to identify and switch to smaller instance types where appropriate.
- E
Switch to AWS Elastic Beanstalk to completely eliminate the need for EC2 instances.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answers: A, C, D
Explanation
To optimize costs while maintaining performance and availability, leveraging Auto Scaling ensures resources are adjusted to match demand, preventing over-provisioning. Incorporating Spot Instances for non-critical tasks reduces costs, while using On-Demand Instances for critical tasks ensures reliability. Rightsizing EC2 instances helps identify and eliminate over-provisioned resources, further optimizing costs. These strategies collectively ensure the application remains cost-effective and performant.
- A. Correct.
Enabling Auto Scaling ensures that the application can dynamically scale in or out based on traffic demand, reducing costs during periods of low usage while maintaining performance during peak traffic.
- B. Incorrect.
Replacing an Application Load Balancer with a Network Load Balancer is not appropriate in this scenario, as the ALB is designed for HTTP/HTTPS traffic and provides layer 7 features like host-based routing, which are likely required by the application.
- C. Correct.
Using Spot Instances for non-critical workloads can significantly reduce costs, while keeping On-Demand Instances for critical components ensures availability and reliability for essential parts of the application.
- D. Correct.
Configuring EC2 instance rightsizing recommendations allows you to identify over-provisioned resources and downsize to smaller instance types, reducing costs without sacrificing performance.
- E. Incorrect.
Switching to AWS Elastic Beanstalk is not a guaranteed cost optimization strategy, and it may not align with the application's architecture or requirements. Additionally, Elastic Beanstalk may still use EC2 instances under the hood, so costs would not necessarily be eliminated.