SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question

A company is designing a new application that will run on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application must handle sudden spikes in traffic without manual intervention. Which scaling strategy should be used?

⚠ Common exam trap

It's easy for candidates to confuse 'scheduled scaling' (which works for predictable patterns) with 'dynamic scaling' (which handles unpredictable spikes), and may overlook that target tracking is the only fully automated policy that continuously adjusts capacity based on a real-time metric without manual cooldown tuning.

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

✓

Target tracking scaling policy

Target tracking scaling policy is the correct choice because it automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances to maintain a specified target metric (e.g., average CPU utilization or request count per target) without manual intervention. This policy uses a built-in metric and dynamically calculates the required capacity to handle sudden traffic spikes, aligning with the requirement for automatic scaling under unpredictable load.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

✗
Manual scaling by operations team
Why it's wrong here
Manual scaling is not automated.
✗
Simple scaling with a cooldown period
Why it's wrong here
Simple scaling may not keep up with rapid changes.
✗
Scheduled scaling based on historical data
Why it's wrong here
Scheduled scaling cannot handle sudden spikes.
✓
Target tracking scaling policy
Why this is correct
Target tracking dynamically adjusts capacity to maintain a metric target.

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SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question

Why each option matters

Option-by-option breakdown

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