AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 851

An Auto Scaling group is running at the desired capacity of 5 instances and receives a trigger from the Cloudwatch Alarm to increase the capacity by 1. The cool down period is 5 minutes.
Cloudwatch sends another trigger after 2 minutes to decrease the desired capacity by 1. What will be the count of instances at the end of 4 minutes?

Answer options

• A. 7
• B. 6
• C. 4
• D. 5

Correct answer: B

Explanation

When the first CloudWatch alarm triggers at minute 0, the Auto Scaling group immediately increases its desired capacity from 5 to 6 and enters a 5-minute cooldown period. The second trigger to decrease capacity occurs at minute 2, which is during this cooldown period, meaning Auto Scaling will ignore it. Therefore, at minute 4, the instance count remains at 6.