AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) — Question 299

An ecommerce company wants to use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to add and remove EC2 instances based on CPU utilization.

Which AWS service or feature can initiate an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling action to achieve this goal?

Answer options

• A. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• B. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)
• C. AWS Systems Manager
• D. Amazon CloudWatch alarm

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon CloudWatch alarms can monitor metrics like CPU utilization on Amazon EC2 instances and trigger scaling policies when specific thresholds are breached. Other options like Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and AWS Systems Manager cannot directly monitor CPU metrics and trigger Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling actions based on those metrics. Therefore, an Amazon CloudWatch alarm is the correct service to initiate the scaling process.