AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Resilient ArchitecturesEasy
A global e-commerce company experiences unpredictable traffic spikes during flash sales and holiday seasons. They need a solution that automatically scales their web application to handle these fluctuations while minimizing operational overhead. The solution should also distribute incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances. Which combination of AWS services should they use?
- AAmazon EC2 Spot Instances and AWS Global Accelerator
- BAmazon SQS and AWS Lambda
- CAWS Auto Scaling and Application Load Balancer (ALB)
- DAmazon RDS Multi-AZ and Amazon CloudFront
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. AWS Auto Scaling and Application Load Balancer (ALB)
AWS Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on demand, handling traffic spikes. An Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Spot Instances are for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads, and Global Accelerator improves global performance, but neither alone provides automatic scaling and traffic distribution for web apps.
- B. SQS and Lambda are for event-driven, serverless architectures, not directly for scaling EC2-based web applications.
- D. RDS Multi-AZ is for database high availability, and CloudFront is a CDN; neither directly scales EC2 compute for web traffic.
EC2 Auto Scaling with ELB
A combination of AWS Auto Scaling to automatically adjust compute capacity and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute incoming traffic, ensuring high availability and scalability for applications.
- Automatically adjusts EC2 instance count
- Distributes traffic across instances
- Handles unpredictable demand
- Improves fault tolerance
Memory trick: Auto Scaling and ALBs are the dynamic duo for web traffic.