AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 262

A company is hosting a three-tier web application in an on-premises environment. Due to a recent surge in traffic that resulted in downtime and a significant financial impact, company management has ordered that the application be moved to AWS. The application is written in .NET and has a dependency on a MySQL database. A solutions architect must design a scalable and highly available solution to meet the demand of 200,000 daily users.
Which steps should the solutions architect take to design an appropriate solution?

Answer options

• A. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to create a new application with a web server environment and an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The environment should launch a Network Load Balancer (NLB) in front of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group in multiple Availability Zones. Use an Amazon Route 53 alias record to route traffic from the company's domain to the NLB.
• B. Use AWS CloudFormation to launch a stack containing an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group spanning three Availability Zones. The stack should launch a Multi-AZ deployment of an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with a Retain deletion policy. Use an Amazon Route 53 alias record to route traffic from the company's domain to the ALB.
• C. Use AWS Elastic Beanstalk to create an automatically scaling web server environment that spans two separate Regions with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in each Region. Create a Multi-AZ deployment of an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with a cross-Region read replica. Use Amazon Route 53 with a geoproximity routing policy to route traffic between the two Regions.
• D. Use AWS CloudFormation to launch a stack containing an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Amazon ECS cluster of Spot instances spanning three Availability Zones. The stack should launch an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance with a Snapshot deletion policy. Use an Amazon Route 53 alias record to route traffic from the company's domain to the ALB.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because it utilizes AWS CloudFormation to create a highly available architecture with an Application Load Balancer and a Multi-AZ Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster, which is suitable for scalability and availability. The other options either use services that are not optimal for this specific case, like Elastic Beanstalk in A and C, or do not provide the necessary high availability and multi-AZ deployment required for critical applications, as seen in D.