DVA-C02 Deployment Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Use a scheduled scaling action to increase capacity during peak hours.

  Why it's wrong here

  Scheduled scaling actions are suitable for predictable traffic patterns, such as daily business hours or weekly events, where the increase in demand is known in advance. However, they lack the dynamism to respond to unexpected or sudden spikes in traffic that deviate from the pre-defined schedule. This approach would fail to automatically adjust capacity for unforeseen load, potentially leading to performance degradation or service unavailability during unpredicted peak periods.

• ✗

  Manually add EC2 instances during peak hours.

  Why it's wrong here

  Manually adding EC2 instances during peak hours introduces significant operational overhead and is prone to human error, directly contradicting the benefits of an automated cloud environment. This approach requires constant monitoring and intervention from a developer, which is inefficient and cannot react quickly enough to rapidly changing demand. It negates the core principle of elasticity, where resources should automatically scale based on real-time application load without manual intervention.

• ✗

  Set the environment to use a fixed number of EC2 instances.

  Why it's wrong here

  Setting the environment to a fixed number of EC2 instances means the application's capacity remains constant regardless of actual user demand. This configuration inherently prevents any form of automatic scaling, leading to either over-provisioning and unnecessary costs during low traffic, or under-provisioning and performance bottlenecks during high traffic. A fixed instance count fails to leverage the elasticity of AWS, which is designed to optimize resource utilization and maintain application performance dynamically.

• ✓

  Configure Auto Scaling triggers based on CloudWatch alarms.

  Why this is correct

  Configuring Auto Scaling triggers based on CloudWatch alarms provides a robust and dynamic solution for automatically adjusting EC2 instance capacity in response to real-time application load. CloudWatch monitors key metrics like CPU utilization or network I/O, and when predefined thresholds are breached, it triggers Auto Scaling policies to add or remove instances. This ensures optimal performance and cost efficiency by scaling resources precisely when needed, without manual intervention or reliance on predictable schedules.

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