AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 500
You have deployed a three-tier web application in a VPC with a CIDR block of 10.0.0.0/28. You initially deploy two web servers, two application servers, two database servers and one NAT instance tor a total of seven EC2 instances. The web, application and database servers are deployed across two availability zones
(AZs). You also deploy an ELB in front of the two web servers, and use Route53 for DNS Web (raffle gradually increases in the first few days following the deployment, so you attempt to double the number of instances in each tier of the application to handle the new load unfortunately some of these new instances fail to launch.
Which of the following could be the root caused? (Choose two.)
Answer options
- A. AWS reserves the first and the last private IP address in each subnet's CIDR block so you do not have enough addresses left to launch all of the new EC2 instances
- B. The Internet Gateway (IGW) of your VPC has scaled-up, adding more instances to handle the traffic spike, reducing the number of available private IP addresses for new instance launches
- C. The ELB has scaled-up, adding more instances to handle the traffic spike, reducing the number of available private IP addresses for new instance launches
- D. AWS reserves one IP address in each subnet's CIDR block for Route53 so you do not have enough addresses left to launch all of the new EC2 instances
- E. AWS reserves the first four and the last IP address in each subnet's CIDR block so you do not have enough addresses left to launch all of the new EC2 instances
Correct answer: C, E
Explanation
A /28 CIDR block provides only 16 IP addresses in total, which are severely constrained because AWS reserves five IP addresses in every subnet (the first four and the last one). Furthermore, Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) scale dynamically by provisioning additional nodes that consume private IP addresses from the subnets they are deployed in. The combination of AWS's reserved IPs and the scaling ELB quickly exhausted the extremely limited IP pool, preventing the new EC2 instances from obtaining IP addresses and launching successfully.