AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 1

A company is migrating a distributed application to AWS. The application serves variable workloads. The legacy platform consists of a primary server that coordinates jobs across multiple compute nodes. The company wants to modernize the application with a solution that maximizes resiliency and scalability.
How should a solutions architect design the architecture to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Configure an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue as a destination for the jobs. Implement the compute nodes with Amazon EC2 instances that are managed in an Auto Scaling group. Configure EC2 Auto Scaling to use scheduled scaling.
• B. Configure an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue as a destination for the jobs. Implement the compute nodes with Amazon EC2 instances that are managed in an Auto Scaling group. Configure EC2 Auto Scaling based on the size of the queue.
• C. Implement the primary server and the compute nodes with Amazon EC2 instances that are managed in an Auto Scaling group. Configure AWS CloudTrail as a destination for the jobs. Configure EC2 Auto Scaling based on the load on the primary server.
• D. Implement the primary server and the compute nodes with Amazon EC2 instances that are managed in an Auto Scaling group. Configure Amazon EventBridge (Amazon CloudWatch Events) as a destination for the jobs. Configure EC2 Auto Scaling based on the load on the compute nodes.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because using an Amazon SQS queue allows for decoupling the job processing from the compute resources, enabling better management of variable workloads. The Auto Scaling group can dynamically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on the queue size, improving both scalability and resiliency. The other options either do not utilize SQS or do not effectively manage the workload variability, which could lead to inefficiencies.