AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 565

A company has a business application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the CPU utilization on the EC2 instances is very high. There are also reports from users that receive HTTP 503 and 504 errors when they try to connect to the application.
Which action will resolve these issues?

Answer options

• A. Place the EC2 instances into an AWS Auto Scaling group.
• B. Configure the ALB's Target Group to use more frequent health checks.
• C. Enable sticky sessions on the Application Load Balancer.
• D. Increase the idle timeout setting of the Application Load Balancer.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

High CPU utilization causing HTTP 503 and 504 errors indicates that the existing EC2 instances are overloaded and unable to process incoming requests in a timely manner. Placing the instances into an AWS Auto Scaling group resolves this by dynamically adding more EC2 instances to handle the traffic load. Adjusting health checks, enabling sticky sessions, or increasing the idle timeout will not resolve the underlying compute capacity shortage.