AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 426

A company has an application that runs on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Elastic Load Balancer. The instances run in an Auto Scaling group. The application's performance remains consistent throughout most of each day. However, an increase in user traffic slows the performance during the same 4-hour period of time each day.
What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that will resolve this issue?

Answer options

• A. Configure a second Elastic Load Balancer in front of the Auto Scaling group with a weighted routing policy.
• B. Configure the fleet of EC2 instances to run on larger instance types to support the increase in user traffic.
• C. Create a scheduled scaling action to scale out the number of EC2 instances shortly before the increase in user traffic occurs.
• D. Manually add a few more EC2 instances to the Auto Scaling group to support the increase in user traffic.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Since the traffic spike occurs predictably at the same time every day, a scheduled scaling action is the most operationally efficient way to proactively scale out EC2 instances before the load increases. Manually adding instances or permanently upgrading to larger instance types is operationally inefficient and introduces unnecessary costs. Adding a second load balancer does not address the underlying compute capacity constraints of the Auto Scaling group.