AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional — Question 664

A company owns a chain of travel agencies and is running an application in the AWS Cloud. Company employees use the application to search for information about travel destinations. Destination content is updated four times each year.
Two fixed Amazon EC2 instances serve the application. The company uses an Amazon Route 53 public hosted zone with a multivalue record of travel.example.com that returns the Elastic IP addresses for the EC2 instances. The application uses Amazon DynamoDB as its primary data store. The company uses a self-hosted Redis instance as a caching solution.
During content updates, the load on the EC2 instances and the caching solution increases drastically. This increased load has led to downtime on several occasions. A solutions architect must update the application so that the application is highly available and can handle the load that is generated by the content updates.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Set up DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) as in-memory cache. Update the application to use DAX. Create an Auto Scaling group for the EC2 instances. Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Set the Auto Scaling group as a target for the ALB. Update the Route 53 record to use a simple routing policy that targets the ALB's DNS alias. Configure scheduled scaling for the EC2 instances before the content updates.
• B. Set up Amazon ElastiCache for Redis. Update the application to use ElastiCache. Create an Auto Scaling group for the EC2 instances. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution, and set the Auto Scaling group as an origin for the distribution. Update the Route 53 record to use a simple routing policy that targets the CloudFront distribution's DNS alias. Manually scale up EC2 instances before the content updates.
• C. Set up Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached. Update the application to use ElastiCache Create an Auto Scaling group for the EC2 instances. Create an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Set the Auto Scaling group as a target for the ALB. Update the Route 53 record to use a simple routing policy that targets the ALB's DNS alias. Configure scheduled scaling for the application before the content updates.
• D. Set up DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) as in-memory cache. Update the application to use DAX. Create an Auto Scaling group for the EC2 instances. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution, and set the Auto Scaling group as an origin for the distribution. Update the Route 53 record to use a simple routing policy that targets the CloudFront distribution's DNS alias. Manually scale up EC2 instances before the content updates.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the correct solution as it effectively integrates DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for improved caching performance and implements an Auto Scaling group with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to manage traffic during peak loads. The other options either do not leverage DAX properly or suggest manual scaling, which does not provide an automated and efficient response to the load during content updates.