AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) — Question 430

A company runs an application in the cloud that consists of a database and a website. Users can post data to the website, have the data processed, and have the data sent back to them in an email. Data is stored in a MySQL database running on an Amazon EC2 instance. The database is running in a VPC with two private subnets. The website is running on Apache Tomcat in a single EC2 instance in a different VPC with one public subnet. There is a single VPC peering connection between the database and website VPC.

The website has suffered several outages during the last month due to high traffic.

Which actions should a solutions architect take to increase the reliability of the application? (Choose three.)

Answer options

• A. Place the Tomcat server in an Auto Scaling group with multiple EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer.
• B. Provision an additional VPC peering connection.
• C. Migrate the MySQL database to Amazon Aurora with one Aurora Replica.
• D. Provision two NAT gateways in the database VPC.
• E. Move the Tomcat server to the database VPC.
• F. Create an additional public subnet in a different Availability Zone in the website VPC.

Correct answer: A, C, F

Explanation

To improve application reliability and handle high traffic, deploying the Tomcat servers in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (Option A) ensures high availability, which requires an additional public subnet in a different Availability Zone (Option F) for multi-AZ redundancy. Migrating the single EC2 MySQL database to Amazon Aurora with a replica (Option C) removes the single point of failure at the database layer and enables automatic failover. Other options like adding extra VPC peering connections or NAT gateways do not address the scaling and high availability limitations of the single-instance web and database layers.