AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 172

A company must re-evaluate its need for the Amazon EC2 instances it currently has provisioned in an Auto Scaling group. At present, the Auto Scaling group is configured for a minimum of two instances and a maximum of four instances across two Availability Zones. A Solutions architect reviewed Amazon CloudWatch metrics and found that CPU utilization is consistently low for all the EC2 instances.
What should the solutions architect recommend to maximize utilization while ensuring the application remains fault tolerant?

Answer options

• A. Remove some EC2 instances to increase the utilization of remaining instances.
• B. Increase the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) capacity of instances with less CPU utilization.
• C. Modify the Auto Scaling group scaling policy to scale in and out based on a higher CPU utilization metric.
• D. Create a new launch configuration that uses smaller instance types. Update the existing Auto Scaling group.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

The correct answer is D because creating a new launch configuration with smaller instance types would optimize resource allocation while maintaining fault tolerance in the Auto Scaling group. Option A reduces redundancy, which compromises fault tolerance, while B does not address the low CPU utilization effectively. Option C could lead to unnecessary scaling actions, which wouldn't resolve the low utilization issue.