AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — Question 12

An e-commerce company is running a web application in an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment. In recent months, the average load of the Amazon EC2 instances has been increased to handle more traffic.
The company would like to improve the scalability and resilience of the environment. The Development team has been asked to decouple long-running tasks from the environment if the tasks can be executed asynchronously. Examples of these tasks include confirmation emails when users are registered to the platform, and processing images or videos. Also, some of the periodic tasks that are currently running within the web server should be offloaded.
What is the MOST time-efficient and integrated way to achieve this?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon SQS queue and send the tasks that should be decoupled from the Elastic Beanstalk web server environment to the SQS queue. Create a fleet of EC2 instances under an Auto Scaling group. Use an AMI that contains the application to process the asynchronous tasks, configure the application to listen for messages within the SQS queue, and create periodic tasks by placing those into the cron in the operating system. Create an environment variable within the Elastic Beanstalk environment with a value pointing to the SQS queue endpoint.
• B. Create a second Elastic Beanstalk worker tier environment and deploy the application to process the asynchronous tasks there. Send the tasks that should be decoupled from the original Elastic Beanstalk web server environment to the auto-generated Amazon SQS queue by the Elastic Beanstalk worker environment. Place a cron.yaml file within the root of the application source bundle for the worker environment for periodic tasks. Use environment links to link the web server environment with the worker environment.
• C. Create a second Elastic Beanstalk web server tier environment and deploy the application to process the asynchronous tasks. Send the tasks that should be decoupled from the original Elastic Beanstalk web server to the auto-generated Amazon SQS queue by the second Elastic Beanstalk web server tier environment. Place a cron.yaml file within the root of the application source bundle for the second web server tier environment with the necessary periodic tasks. Use environment links to link both web server environments.
• D. Create an Amazon SQS queue and send the tasks that should be decoupled from the Elastic Beanstalk web server environment to the SQS queue. Create a fleet of EC2 instances under an Auto Scaling group. Install and configure the application to listen for messages within the SQS queue from UserData and create periodic tasks by placing those into the cron in the operating system. Create an environment variable within the Elastic Beanstalk web server environment with a value pointing to the SQS queue endpoint.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct option is B, which involves creating a second Elastic Beanstalk worker tier environment dedicated to processing asynchronous tasks, leveraging the built-in integration with Amazon SQS. This approach is optimal as it cleanly separates the workloads and simplifies management, unlike the other options which either overcomplicate the architecture or do not utilize the worker tier effectively.