AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 297

A company has implemented a Kubernetes cluster on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon ECS) to host a microservices-based application. The company expects application traffic to increase significantly for the next month and wants to prevent the application from crashing because of the high number of requests.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST administrative overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create a second EKS cluster. Load balance the workload between the two clusters.
• B. Implement the Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. Set a target CPU utilization percentage.
• C. Migrate the application from Amazon EKS to Amazon EC2 for the next month. Migrate the application back to Amazon EKS when the month ends.
• D. Implement the Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler. Set a target CPU utilization percentage.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) automatically scales the number of pods in a deployment based on observed CPU utilization, which prevents application crashes under high traffic with minimal manual intervention. Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) adjusts the resource limits of existing pods, which can cause pod restarts and is less effective for handling sudden, massive traffic spikes compared to horizontal scaling. Creating a second cluster or migrating workloads to Amazon EC2 introduces significant administrative overhead and complexity.