AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 464

A company runs a stateless application that is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. Users are reporting performance issues. A SysOps administrator reviews the
Amazon CloudWatch metrics for the application and notices that the instance's CPU utilization frequently reaches 90% during business hours.
What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that will improve the application's responsiveness?

Answer options

• A. Configure CloudWatch logging on the EC2 instance. Configure a CloudWatch alarm for CPU utilization to alert the SysOps administrator when CPU utilization goes above 90%.
• B. Configure an AWS Client VPN connection to allow the application users to connect directly to the EC2 instance private IP address to reduce latency.
• C. Create an Auto Scaling group, and assign it to an Application Load Balancer. Configure a target tracking scaling policy that is based on the average CPU utilization of the Auto Scaling group.
• D. Create a CloudWatch alarm that activates when the EC2 instance's CPU utilization goes above 80%. Configure the alarm to invoke an AWS Lambda function that vertically scales the instance.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Since the application is stateless, it is ideal for horizontal scaling. Utilizing an Auto Scaling group with an Application Load Balancer and a target tracking scaling policy dynamically adjusts the number of EC2 instances to handle the load without manual intervention, making it the most operationally efficient solution. Other options either do not resolve the resource constraint automatically, focus on latency rather than CPU utilization, or introduce unnecessary complexity and downtime through vertical scaling.