AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 295

A company has an ecommerce application running in a single VPC. The application stack has a single web server and an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance.
The company launches new products twice a month. This increases website traffic by approximately 400% for a minimum of 72 hours. During product launches, users experience slow response times and frequent timeout errors in their browsers.
What should a solutions architect do to mitigate the slow response times and timeout errors while minimizing operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Increase the instance size of the web server.
• B. Add an Application Load Balancer and an additional web server.
• C. Add Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and an Application Load Balancer.
• D. Deploy an Amazon ElastiCache cluster to store frequently accessed data.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Implementing Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling alongside an Application Load Balancer (ALB) automatically scales the web server tier to handle the 400% traffic spikes, distributing load evenly and eliminating the single web server bottleneck with minimal manual intervention. Upgrading a single instance size (Option A) or manually adding one extra server (Option B) does not provide the dynamic, automated elasticity needed for such large, periodic spikes. While Amazon ElastiCache (Option D) improves database performance, it does not resolve the resource exhaustion on the single web server that causes the timeout errors.