AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 15

A company's application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. On the first day of every month at midnight, the application becomes much slower when the month-end financial calculation batch executes. This causes the CPU utilization of the EC2 instances to immediately peak to 100%, which disrupts the application.
What should a solutions architect recommend to ensure the application is able to handle the workload and avoid downtime?

Answer options

• A. Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB.
• B. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
• C. Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule.
• D. Configure Amazon ElastiCache to remove some of the workload from the EC2 instances.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C because a scheduled scaling policy allows for proactive scaling of the EC2 instances at specific times, such as when the month-end batch process runs. This will help accommodate the expected increase in workload. Options A and D do not address the scaling needs directly, while option B relies on reactive scaling, which may not be sufficient to prevent the application from experiencing downtime during peak load.