AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 712

A solutions architect is designing the architecture for a software demonstration environment. The environment will run on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto
Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The system will experience significant increases in traffic during working hours but is not required to operate on weekends.
Which combination of actions should the solutions architect take to ensure that the system can scale to meet demand? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Auto Scaling to adjust the ALB capacity based on request rate.
• B. Use AWS Auto Scaling to scale the capacity of the VPC internet gateway.
• C. Launch the EC2 instances in multiple AWS Regions to distribute the load across Regions.
• D. Use a target tracking scaling policy to scale the Auto Scaling group based on instance CPU utilization.
• E. Use scheduled scaling to change the Auto Scaling group minimum, maximum, and desired capacity to zero for weekends. Revert to the default values at the start of the week.

Correct answer: D, E

Explanation

A target tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization allows the Auto Scaling group to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances to handle the varying traffic during working hours. Utilizing scheduled scaling to set the Auto Scaling group capacities to zero on weekends and restore them on weekdays effectively manages costs for an environment that is not needed during non-working days. Other options like scaling the internet gateway or ALB capacity directly via Auto Scaling are incorrect because those components scale automatically or cannot be configured this way by the user.