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
Target tracking scaling adjusts EC2 capacity automatically in response to a CloudWatch metric such as average CPU utilisation, so the fleet expands before latency degrades. This directly addresses the stem's consistently high peak CPU and rising request latency behind the ALB.
- ✗
S3 Object Lock
Why it's wrong here
S3 Object Lock enforces WORM retention on S3 objects, which has no bearing on EC2 CPU saturation behind an ALB. It is tempting because Object Lock genuinely protects data immutability for compliance, but that scenario involves S3 buckets, not compute scaling under peak request load.
- ✗
A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only
Why it's wrong here
A CloudWatch VPC endpoint only carries metric and log traffic privately; it neither adds compute capacity nor reduces instance CPU, so latency persists. It is tempting because private connectivity to CloudWatch is genuinely useful for monitoring without internet exposure, but the stem needs Auto Scaling, not telemetry plumbing.
- ✗
Disable health checks
Why it's wrong here
Disabling health checks stops the ALB from detecting and replacing unhealthy targets, worsening availability without reducing CPU load. It is tempting because health checks can cause churn during overload, and tuning them is legitimate when targets are slow to start, but removing them entirely is never the scaling fix.
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