AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 598

A company hosts a multi-tier web application on Amazon Linux Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto
Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The company observes that the Auto Scaling group launches more On-Demand Instances when the application's end users access high volumes of static web content. The company wants to optimize cost.
What should a solutions architect do to redesign the application MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Update the Auto Scaling group to use Reserved Instances instead of On-Demand Instances.
• B. Update the Auto Scaling group to scale by launching Spot Instances instead of On-Demand Instances.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution to host the static web contents from an Amazon S3 bucket.
• D. Create an AWS Lambda function behind an Amazon API Gateway API to host the static website contents.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Offloading static assets to Amazon S3 and caching them globally via Amazon CloudFront is the most cost-effective and performant architecture for serving static web content, as it completely removes this traffic load from the EC2 instances. Modifying the EC2 instance types (Options A and B) still incurs unnecessary compute costs for static files that do not require server-side processing. Using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway (Option D) is unnecessarily complex and significantly more expensive than S3 and CloudFront for high-volume static content delivery.