SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a high-traffic web application on an EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. The operations team notices that during sudden traffic spikes, new instances take several minutes to become healthy and serve traffic, causing elevated latency. The team wants to reduce the time from instance launch to serving traffic. Which change should a solutions architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that scaling out more aggressively or adjusting health check settings will fix slow instance initialization, when the real issue is the time spent installing and configuring the application at boot.
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
✓
Create a launch template that specifies a pre-baked Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the application fully installed and configured, and use it in the Auto Scaling group.
Using a pre-baked AMI removes the time-consuming installation and configuration steps that occur at instance launch. The application is already present and configured, so the instance can pass health checks and serve traffic much sooner. Other options do not address the underlying bootstrapping delay and may even introduce new problems.
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 size of the Auto Scaling group's maximum capacity so more instances can launch simultaneously.
Why it's wrong here
Raising maximum capacity allows more instances but does not make each instance become healthy faster. The bottleneck is the per-instance bootstrapping time, not the total number of instances. More instances that each take minutes to become healthy will still serve traffic slowly during the spike.
- ✗
Attach an additional target group to the load balancer and register the same instances in both target groups.
Why it's wrong here
Adding target groups does not speed up application initialization on new instances. It may help with routing flexibility, but the health check timing and bootstrapping delay remain unchanged. This does not reduce the time from launch to serving traffic.
- ✓
Create a launch template that specifies a pre-baked Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the application fully installed and configured, and use it in the Auto Scaling group.
Why this is correct
A pre-baked AMI eliminates the need to install and configure the application at boot, so new instances reach a healthy state much faster. This directly addresses the slow scale-out during traffic spikes and is a standard pattern for reducing launch-to-serve time in Auto Scaling groups.
- ✗
Change the Auto Scaling group health check type from EC2 to ELB and reduce the health check grace period to zero.
Why it's wrong here
Changing the health check type to ELB makes the group rely on load balancer health checks, and reducing the grace period to zero can cause instances to be marked unhealthy before they finish booting. This worsens the situation rather than reducing launch-to-serve time.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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.