AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 505

A company runs container applications by using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The company's workload is not consistent throughout the day. The company wants Amazon EKS to scale in and out according to the workload.

Which combination of steps will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Use an AWS Lambda function to resize the EKS cluster.
• B. Use the Kubernetes Metrics Server to activate horizontal pod autoscaling.
• C. Use the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler to manage the number of nodes in the cluster.
• D. Use Amazon API Gateway and connect it to Amazon EKS.
• E. Use AWS App Mesh to observe network activity.

Correct answer: B, C

Explanation

To dynamically scale container workloads on Amazon EKS, a combination of pod-level and node-level scaling is required. Utilizing the Kubernetes Metrics Server enables the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) to scale the number of pods based on resource metrics, while the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler automatically adjusts the underlying EC2 node count when pods cannot be scheduled due to resource constraints. Other options like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, or AWS App Mesh do not natively handle the automated scaling of Kubernetes pods or worker nodes.