SAA-C03 Auto Scaling policy Practice Question
A travel booking site uses EC2 instances behind an ALB. CPU is consistently high during peak traffic, and request latency rises. What should be configured? The design must avoid adding custom operational scripts.
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is that candidates might think a VPC endpoint (Option A) is needed for CloudWatch metrics, but CloudWatch metrics are already available without a VPC endpoint, and scaling requires an Auto Scaling policy, not just metric access.
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 a CloudWatch metric like CPUUtilization or request latency directly addresses the high CPU and rising latency by automatically adding EC2 instances during peak traffic. This eliminates the need for custom scripts and ensures the application scales horizontally to maintain performance.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
A VPC endpoint for CloudWatch only
Why it's wrong here
A VPC endpoint changes network path, not instance capacity.
- ✓
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.
- ✗
Disable health checks
Why it's wrong here
Disabling health checks weakens availability and does not improve capacity.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.