SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Question
A retail API uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse operational features (like S3 Object Lock or VPC endpoints) with scaling mechanisms, or mistakenly think disabling health checks improves performance, when in fact it degrades reliability and latency.
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
✓
Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric
An Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric (such as CPUUtilization or ALBRequestCountPerTarget) dynamically adds or removes EC2 instances to match demand. This directly addresses the high CPU and rising latency by distributing the load across more instances, preventing performance degradation during peak traffic.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Auto Scaling policy based on an appropriate CloudWatch metric
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling adds capacity when load increases and removes it when load falls.
- ✗
S3 Object Lock
Why it's wrong here
Object Lock controls retention, not EC2 compute capacity.
- ✗
A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only
Why it's wrong here
A VPC endpoint changes network path, not instance capacity.
- ✗
Disable health checks
Why it's wrong here
Disabling health checks weakens availability and does not improve capacity.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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