AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesMedium
A gaming company is using Amazon EC2 instances to host its game servers. During peak hours, the servers experience high CPU utilization and latency, leading to a poor user experience. The company wants to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances based on demand to maintain optimal performance and minimize costs during off-peak hours. Which AWS service should be used to achieve this elasticity and scalability?
- AAmazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a dynamic scaling policy.
- BAmazon CloudWatch for monitoring and alarms.
- CAWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic.
- DAWS Systems Manager to automate instance management.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a dynamic scaling policy.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances based on demand, defined by metrics like CPU utilization. This ensures that the application maintains optimal performance during peak loads and reduces costs during off-peak hours by scaling down, providing the required elasticity and scalability.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. CloudWatch monitors metrics and triggers alarms, which can be used *with* Auto Scaling, but CloudWatch itself does not perform the scaling action.
- C. ELB distributes traffic but does not scale the underlying EC2 instances themselves.
- D. AWS Systems Manager helps automate operational tasks but is not primarily used for dynamic scaling of compute capacity.
EC2 Auto Scaling
An AWS service that automatically adjusts the number of Amazon EC2 instances in your application based on defined conditions to maintain performance and reduce costs.
- Adds instances during demand spikes, removes during lulls.
- Integrates with CloudWatch for metric-based scaling.
- Improves fault tolerance by replacing unhealthy instances.
Memory trick: Auto Scaling is like a smart elevator, always having just the right number of cars.