AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design High-Performing ArchitecturesMedium
An online gaming company is experiencing unpredictable traffic spikes during peak hours and game releases. Their current compute infrastructure, based on a fixed number of EC2 instances, frequently struggles to keep up, leading to poor user experience. The company needs a highly scalable and cost-effective solution that can automatically adjust compute capacity based on demand, minimizing operational overhead.
- AUse Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances with Auto Scaling.
- BManually add and remove EC2 instances based on monitoring alerts.
- CMigrate to AWS Lambda for all game logic.
- DImplement Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a target tracking scaling policy.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Implement Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a target tracking scaling policy.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling with a target tracking scaling policy automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group to maintain a specified metric (e.g., CPU utilization) at a target value. This is ideal for unpredictable traffic spikes, ensuring optimal performance and cost-effectiveness by scaling capacity up and down as needed without manual intervention.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Reserved Instances are for predictable, long-term workloads; they don't provide automatic scaling for unpredictable spikes.
- B. Manually adjusting instances is inefficient, prone to human error, and does not meet the requirement for minimizing operational overhead and automatic adjustment.
- C. Migrating all game logic to Lambda might be a significant architectural overhaul and might not be suitable for all types of game workloads due to Lambda's execution limits.
EC2 Auto Scaling
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain application availability and allows you to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to conditions you define.
- Ensures desired number of instances are running.
- Automatically scales capacity up and down to meet demand.
- Improves fault tolerance by replacing unhealthy instances.
- Supports various scaling policies (e.g., target tracking, simple, step, scheduled).
Memory trick: Auto Scaling: Automatically Adjusts Compute for Agility.