AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 257

A company wants to move a multi-tiered application from on premises to the AWS Cloud to improve the application's performance. The application consists of application tiers that communicate with each other by way of RESTful services. Transactions are dropped when one tier becomes overloaded. A solutions architect must design a solution that resolves these issues and modernizes the application.
Which solution meets these requirements and is the MOST operationally efficient?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon API Gateway and direct transactions to the AWS Lambda functions as the application layer. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as the communication layer between application services.
• B. Use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to analyze the application performance history to determine the server's peak utilization during the performance failures. Increase the size of the application server's Amazon EC2 instances to meet the peak requirements.
• C. Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to handle the messaging between application servers running on Amazon EC2 in an Auto Scaling group. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the SNS queue length and scale up and down as required.
• D. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to handle the messaging between application servers running on Amazon EC2 in an Auto Scaling group. Use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the SQS queue length and scale up when communication failures are detected.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the most operationally efficient solution as it utilizes Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda, allowing for automatic scaling and eliminating transaction drops due to overload. Option B merely increases server capacity without addressing performance issues during peak times. Options C and D involve messaging services but still rely on Amazon EC2 instances that may not efficiently handle overload situations.