AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 489

A company that provisions job boards for a seasonal workforce is seeing an increase in traffic and usage. The backend services run on a pair of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer with Amazon DynamoDB as the datastore. Application read and write traffic is slow during peak seasons.
Which option provides a scalable application architecture to handle peak seasons with the LEAST development effort?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the backend services to AWS Lambda. Increase the read and write capacity of DynamoDB
• B. Migrate the backend services to AWS Lambda. Configure DynamoDB to use global tables
• C. Use Auto Scaling groups for the backend services. Use DynamoDB auto scaling
• D. Use Auto Scaling groups for the backend services. Use Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and an AWS Lambda function to write to DynamoDB

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Option C requires the least development effort because it utilizes native AWS scaling features—Auto Scaling groups for EC2 and DynamoDB auto scaling—without requiring any application code changes. Options A and B require refactoring the backend services to run on AWS Lambda, which demands substantial development time. Option D introduces additional complexity by requiring code modifications to integrate Amazon SQS and AWS Lambda for database writes.