AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 893

A company hosts a monolithic web application on an Amazon EC2 instance. Application users have recently reported poor performance at specific times. Analysis of Amazon CloudWatch metrics shows that CPU utilization is 100% during the periods of poor performance.

The company wants to resolve this performance issue and improve application availability.

Which combination of steps will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Compute Optimizer to obtain a recommendation for an instance type to scale vertically.
• B. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the web server. Reference the AMI in a new launch template.
• C. Create an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer to scale vertically.
• D. Use AWS Compute Optimizer to obtain a recommendation for an instance type to scale horizontally.
• E. Create an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer to scale horizontally.

Correct answer: A, E

Explanation

Using AWS Compute Optimizer helps identify the most cost-effective instance type to scale vertically for the baseline workload, ensuring the underlying instance is not over-provisioned. To handle intermittent peak traffic and ensure high availability, creating an Auto Scaling group with an Application Load Balancer allows the application to scale horizontally when CPU utilization spikes. Together, these steps resolve the performance bottlenecks cost-effectively while removing the single point of failure.