A retail company experiences massive, unpredictable spikes in traffic during flash sales. Their architecture consists of an Application Load Balancer, an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, and an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. During a recent sale, the Auto Scaling group took 5 minutes to launch new instances, causing the application to crash under the sudden load. How can the Architect ensure the compute capacity is available IMMEDIATELY when a flash sale begins, without over-provisioning 24/7?

Answer options:

Use AWS Auto Scaling Scheduled Actions to scale out the Auto Scaling group 15 minutes before the flash sale begins.

Change the Auto Scaling group to use a Target Tracking scaling policy based on CPU utilization.

Implement AWS Global Accelerator to distribute the traffic spikes across multiple AWS Regions.

Migrate the application to AWS Fargate to eliminate instance boot times.

How to approach this question

Recognize that flash sales are predictable events, making scheduled scaling the best approach.

Full Answer

A.Use AWS Auto Scaling Scheduled Actions to scale out the Auto Scaling group 15 minutes before the flash sale begins.✓ Correct

Use AWS Auto Scaling Scheduled Actions to scale out the Auto Scaling group 15 minutes before the flash sale begins.

Reactive scaling (like Target Tracking or Step Scaling) relies on CloudWatch metrics. When traffic spikes instantly, it takes time for the metric to register, the alarm to fire, and the EC2 instances to boot and pass health checks. For predictable events like flash sales, the best practice is to use Scheduled Scaling. You configure the Auto Scaling group to increase its minimum capacity shortly before the sale begins, ensuring the compute is fully provisioned and ready to handle the instant load.

Common mistakes

Relying on reactive scaling (Target Tracking) for instantaneous, predictable traffic spikes.

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Practice the full AWS Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Exam 5

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