AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 456

A company hosts a website on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The website serves static content. Website traffic is increasing, and the company is concerned about a potential increase in cost.

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution to cache state files at edge locations
• B. Create an Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Connect the ALB to the ElastiCache cluster to serve cached files
• C. Create an AWS WAF web ACL and associate it with the ALB. Add a rule to the web ACL to cache static files
• D. Create a second ALB in an alternative AWS Region. Route user traffic to the closest Region to minimize data transfer costs

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that caches static content at edge locations, which reduces the load on the backend EC2 instances and lowers data transfer costs. Amazon ElastiCache is designed for database and session caching, not directly caching web files for an ALB, while AWS WAF is a security service that does not support content caching. Deploying a second ALB in another region would increase infrastructure overhead and costs instead of reducing them.