SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application stores session state in an Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster. The operations team has noticed that during peak hours, application response times increase significantly. They need to improve performance without downtime. Which THREE actions should they take? (Choose 3)
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
✓
Enable connection draining on the ALB.
(Enable connection draining on the ALB) allows in-flight requests to complete before instances are deregistered or replaced, ensuring no disruption during scaling events. Option D (Add read replicas to the ElastiCache Redis cluster) offloads read traffic from the primary Redis node, reducing latency for session reads. Option E (Add more EC2 instances to the Auto Scaling group) horizontally scales the application, distributing load and improving response times during peak hours. Option B (Decrease the idle timeout of the ALB) would prematurely close connections, not improve performance. Option C (Increase the EC2 instance size) is vertical scaling, which could cause downtime unless done with rolling replacement, and is not the best approach for handling increased load with zero downtime.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Enable connection draining on the ALB.
Why this is correct
Connection draining allows existing connections to complete before instances are deregistered, improving availability during scaling events.
- ✗
Decrease the idle timeout of the ALB.
Why it's wrong here
Decreasing idle timeout may cause premature disconnection, degrading user experience.
- ✗
Increase the EC2 instance size to a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling often requires stopping instances, causing downtime.
- ✓
Add read replicas to the ElastiCache Redis cluster.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read requests from the primary node, improving performance.
- ✓
Add more EC2 instances to the Auto Scaling group.
Why this is correct
Horizontal scaling distributes load and improves responsiveness without downtime.
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