AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 214

A company is experiencing growth as demand for its product has increased. The company's existing purchasing application is slow when traffic spikes. The application is a monolithic three-tier application that uses synchronous transactions and sometimes sees bottlenecks in the application tier. A solutions architect needs to design a solution that can meet required application response times while accounting for traffic volume spikes.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Vertically scale the application instance using a larger Amazon EC2 instance size.
• B. Scale the application's persistence layer horizontally by introducing Oracle RAC on AWS.
• C. Scale the web and application tiers horizontally using Auto Scaling groups and an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Decouple the application and data tiers using Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) with asynchronous AWS Lambda calls.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer is C, as horizontally scaling the web and application tiers with Auto Scaling groups and an Application Load Balancer allows the application to handle increased traffic efficiently and ensures better response times. Option A, while it may improve performance, does not address the scalability needed for traffic spikes. Option B focuses on the persistence layer, which does not solve the bottlenecks in the application tier. Option D introduces complexity with asynchronous processing, which may not be necessary for the current needs.