AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 51

A company's application is running on Amazon EC2 instances within an Auto Scaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancer. Based on the application's history, the company anticipates a spike in traffic during a holiday each year. A solutions architect must design a strategy to ensure that the Auto Scaling group proactively increases capacity to minimize any performance impact on application users.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm to scale up the EC2 instances when CPU utilization exceeds 90%.
• B. Create a recurring scheduled action to scale up the Auto Scaling group before the expected period of peak demand.
• C. Increase the minimum and maximum number of EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group during the peak demand period.
• D. Configure an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notification to send alerts when there are autoscaling:EC2_INSTANCE_LAUNCH events.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because it allows for proactive scaling before the anticipated peak demand, ensuring performance is maintained. Option A reacts to CPU utilization, which may be too late to address performance issues. Option C adjusts instance limits but does not trigger the scaling action before the demand spike. Option D only provides notifications and does not affect capacity management.