A company hosts a web application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The ALB and the Auto Scaling group are currently deployed in only one Availability Zone (AZ). The business wants the application to keep running if that AZ has an outage. What is the best change?

Increase the desired capacity in the existing Availability Zone to handle all traffic during an outage.

This increases capacity only in the AZ that is failing. When the AZ outage occurs, instances in that AZ are unavailable regardless of capacity, so there is no redundancy to serve traffic.

Enable longer ALB health check intervals so failing instances are detected more slowly.

Adjusting health check intervals affects how quickly the ALB marks targets unhealthy. It does not add additional capacity in another AZ, so it does not address the outage dependency.

Switch from the ALB to an Internet Gateway so instances can fail over to the public internet.

An Internet Gateway provides internet connectivity, but it does not provide multi-AZ application availability. Without a redundant load-balancing and multi-AZ compute setup, an AZ outage still makes the application unavailable.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Deploy the ALB and the Auto Scaling group across at least two Availability Zones so healthy targets remain. — The best way to handle an Availability Zone outage is to introduce redundancy across failure domains. For this workload, the ALB and the Auto Scaling capacity must be deployed across at least two Availability Zones. When one AZ is impaired, the ALB can continue to receive requests and route them to healthy targets in the other AZ(s). Meanwhile, Auto Scaling can launch replacement instances in the healthy AZ(s) as targets become unhealthy or terminate due to the outage. Option A increases capacity in a single AZ, so there is no surviving compute when the AZ fails. Option C only changes detection timing; it does not create redundancy or availability in another AZ. Option D changes networking connectivity but does not provide health-based routing or multi-AZ compute to keep the service running during an AZ outage.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.