SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in a production AWS account. Recently, the application has experienced intermittent timeouts. The operations team notices that the CPU utilization of the instances spikes to 100% for a few minutes during the timeouts. The Auto Scaling group is configured with a target tracking scaling policy based on average CPU utilization at 70%. What should a solutions architect do to improve the application's availability and reduce timeouts?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often assume reducing the target tracking threshold (Option D) is sufficient, but they overlook that target tracking cannot react quickly enough to sudden spikes, whereas a step scaling policy provides the immediate, aggressive scale-out needed to prevent 100% CPU utilization and timeouts.
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
✓
Add a step scaling policy to scale out by 2 instances when CPU exceeds 80% for 1 minute.
Adding a step scaling policy that triggers at 80% CPU for 1 minute provides a faster, more aggressive scale-out response than the existing target tracking policy alone. This helps preempt the CPU spikes that reach 100% and cause timeouts, improving application availability by adding capacity before performance degrades.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the ALB idle timeout to 120 seconds.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing idle timeout does not address high CPU utilization.
- ✓
Add a step scaling policy to scale out by 2 instances when CPU exceeds 80% for 1 minute.
Why this is correct
Step scaling can add capacity quickly in response to high CPU, reducing timeouts.
- ✗
Enable cross-zone load balancing on the ALB.
Why it's wrong here
Cross-zone load balancing distributes traffic evenly but does not add capacity.
- ✗
Reduce the target tracking scaling threshold to 50% average CPU.
Why it's wrong here
Lowering threshold may cause frequent scaling but does not guarantee faster response to spikes.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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