What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that will improve the application’s responsiveness?

A company runs a stateless application that is hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. Users are reporting performance issues. A SysOps administrator reviews the Amazon CloudWatch metrics for the application and notices that the instance’s CPU utilization frequently reaches 90% during business hours.

What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that will improve the application’s responsiveness?
A . Configure CloudWatch logging on the EC2 instance. Configure a CloudWatch alarm for CPU utilization to alert the SysOps administrator when CPU utilization goes above 90%.
B . Configure an AWS Client VPN connection to allow the application users to connect directly to the EC2 instance private IP address to reduce latency.
C . Create an Auto Scaling group, and assign it to an Application Load Balancer. Configure a target tracking scaling policy that is based on the average CPU utilization of the Auto Scaling group.
D . Create a CloudWatch alarm that activates when the EC2 instance’s CPU utilization goes above 80%. Configure the alarm to invoke an AWS Lambda function that vertically scales the instance.

View Answer

Answer: C

Explanation:

To improve application responsiveness and handle high CPU utilization:

Create Auto Scaling Group:

Create an Auto Scaling group (ASG) for the EC2 instances running the application.

Reference: Auto Scaling Groups

Assign to Application Load Balancer:

Use an Application Load Balancer (ALB) to distribute traffic across the instances in the ASG.

Reference: Application Load Balancers

Configure Target Tracking Scaling Policy:

Set up a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization, for example, keeping CPU utilization around 50-60%.

Reference: Scaling Policies for Auto Scaling

This configuration ensures that the application scales out to handle increased load and improves performance during peak times.