SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a batch processing job on Amazon EMR every night. The job processes data from an S3 bucket and writes results to another S3 bucket. The job currently takes 6 hours to complete. The company wants to reduce the runtime to under 2 hours to meet a new SLA. The data volume is expected to grow by 20% each month. The EMR cluster uses a single master node and 10 core nodes of type m5.xlarge. The job is CPU-bound. What should they do?
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
✓
Increase the number of core nodes in the EMR cluster.
Increasing the number of core nodes (horizontal scaling) distributes the CPU workload across more nodes, directly reducing runtime for CPU-bound jobs. With 20% monthly data growth, scaling out provides more headroom than scaling up. Option A (changing to m5.4xlarge) might help but is less cost-effective and may not keep up with growth. Option B (using spot instances for core nodes) reduces cost but does not address runtime and risks interruptions. Option C (adding task nodes with spot instances) adds compute capacity but spot interruptions can degrade performance, and task nodes lack HDFS storage which might be needed for intermediate data.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Change the core node instance type to m5.4xlarge.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling helps but may not achieve the 3x reduction needed as efficiently as horizontal scaling.
- ✗
Use spot instances for the core nodes to reduce costs.
Why it's wrong here
Spot instances are cheaper but may be interrupted, which could delay the job.
- ✗
Add task nodes with spot instances to the cluster.
Why it's wrong here
Task nodes add compute capacity but spot interruptions could still cause delays.
- ✓
Increase the number of core nodes in the EMR cluster.
Why this is correct
Adding more nodes increases parallelism for CPU-bound tasks, reducing runtime.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
Go deeper
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 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 SAP-C02 exam.