AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 266

A SysOps administrator is responsible for a legacy, CPU-heavy application. The application can only be scaled vertically. Currently, the application is deployed on a single t3.large Amazon EC2 instance. The system is showing 90% CPU usage and significant performance latency after a few minutes.

What change should be made to alleviate the performance problem?

Answer options

• A. Change the Amazon EBS volume to Provisioned IOPs.
• B. Upgrade to a compute-optimized instance.
• C. Add additional t2.large instances to the application.
• D. Purchase Reserved Instances.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Since the application is CPU-bound and can only scale vertically, upgrading to a compute-optimized EC2 instance type is the correct solution to provide the necessary CPU performance. Horizontal scaling by adding more instances is not supported by this legacy application, and upgrading the Amazon EBS volume would only address storage I/O bottlenecks rather than CPU limits. Purchasing Reserved Instances is a financial commitment strategy that does not alter the actual performance of the active instances.