AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 489

A SysOps Administrator deployed an AWS Elastic Beanstalk worker node environment that reads messages from an auto-generated Amazon Simple Queue
Service (Amazon SQS) queue and deletes them from the queue after processing. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling scales in and scales out the number of worker nodes based on CPU utilization. After some time, the Administrator notices that the number of messages in the SQS queue are increasing significantly.
Which action will remediate this issue?

Answer options

• A. Change the scaling policy to scale based upon the number of messages in the queue.
• B. Decouple the queue from the Elastic Beanstalk worker node and create it as a separate resource.
• C. Increase the number of messages in the queue.
• D. Increase the retention period of the queue.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Scaling a worker tier based on CPU utilization is often ineffective if the tasks are not CPU-intensive, which can cause a message backlog to build up in SQS. To address this, the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling policy should be changed to scale based on the number of messages in the queue (or backlog per instance) to ensure there are enough worker nodes to handle the message volume. Other options, such as increasing the retention period or decoupling the queue, do not solve the underlying processing capacity issue.