CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A retail company expects 10x normal traffic during Black Friday. They want to ensure their application can handle this peak load automatically. Which AWS services should they configure to handle this requirement?
⚠ Common exam trap
AWS often tests the misconception that vertical scaling (increasing instance size) is sufficient for handling traffic spikes, but the exam emphasizes horizontal scaling with Auto Scaling and load balancers as the correct approach for elasticity and high availability.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
EC2 Auto Scaling + Application Load Balancer with CloudWatch scaling policies
EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances based on demand, and an Application Load Balancer distributes incoming traffic across those instances. CloudWatch scaling policies monitor metrics like CPU utilization or request count to trigger scaling actions, ensuring the application can handle the 10x traffic spike without manual intervention.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Launch the maximum number of instances before Black Friday and keep them running year-round
Why it's wrong here
Pre-launching the maximum number of instances and keeping them running year-round means paying for enormous idle capacity for 50+ weeks. This approach is over-provisioning: it wastes budget, and it still cannot handle traffic that exceeds the pre-provisioned maximum—so it fails on Black Friday if demand is higher than planned. It also lacks automatic scaling, so any traffic spike outside the fixed fleet size causes performance degradation or outage.
- ✓
EC2 Auto Scaling + Application Load Balancer with CloudWatch scaling policies
Why this is correct
The right solution is EC2 Auto Scaling, an Application Load Balancer, and CloudWatch alarms. Auto Scaling dynamically launches and terminates EC2 instances based on demand, while the ALB distributes incoming traffic evenly across healthy instances. CloudWatch monitors metrics like CPU utilization or request count and triggers scaling policies, giving you elasticity, high availability, and cost control—this is the canonical architecture for variable web workloads.
- ✗
Increase the EC2 instance size to the largest available type
Why it's wrong here
Upgrading to the largest EC2 instance type is vertical scaling, which is limited by the maximum instance size available. Even the biggest instance has a fixed capacity ceiling, so if Black Friday traffic exceeds that ceiling, the application still goes down. It also requires manual resizing and incurs cost even when demand is low, and offers no automatic elasticity or load balancing across multiple instances.
- ✗
Use AWS Snowball to temporarily add compute capacity
Why it's wrong here
AWS Snowball is a physical data-transfer appliance used to move petabytes of data into or out of AWS, not a compute resource. A Snowball device cannot be attached to a live web application, has no network endpoints, and provides no on-demand processing power. It is designed for offline migration and is completely inappropriate for handling sudden traffic spikes or serving HTTP requests.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.