SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Users report intermittent slowdowns. CloudWatch metrics show high CPU utilization on the instances. The company wants to improve performance with minimal architectural changes. What should a solutions architect do?
⚠ Common exam trap
SAP-C02 often tests whether candidates confuse symptom with cause — high CPU is solved by horizontal scaling, not by caching layers or vertical resizing that don't address elasticity.
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
✓
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a dynamic scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
An Auto Scaling group with a dynamic CPU-based scaling policy directly addresses the root cause (high CPU utilization) by adding more instances when demand rises, distributing load and improving performance. This is a minimal architectural change because the ALB already exists and simply registers new instances automatically. It preserves the existing application design while providing elasticity to handle intermittent spikes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Amazon ElastiCache to offload database queries.
Why it's wrong here
ElastiCache offloads repeated database reads, yet the CloudWatch evidence points to CPU saturation on the instances themselves, which caching database queries does not relieve. ElastiCache is correct when database query load, not application compute, is the bottleneck.
- ✓
Configure an Auto Scaling group with a dynamic scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
Why this is correct
A dynamic scaling policy targeting CPU utilisation adds or removes instances automatically as load rises, distributing demand across more capacity. This addresses the high CPU constraint with minimal architectural change, since the existing load balancer already spreads traffic across the group.
- ✗
Replace the EC2 instances with a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
A larger instance type raises the ceiling on a single EC2 instance but leaves the fleet's aggregate capacity and scaling behaviour unchanged, so it does not address the load imbalance causing slowdowns. It is tempting because it is a minimal change, but it would be correct only for a workload that is genuinely CPU-bound on one host.
- ✗
Enable Amazon CloudFront in front of the ALB to cache content.
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront caches at edge locations, reducing origin requests, but the stem's high EC2 CPU utilisation indicates compute-bound processing that caching cannot offload. CloudFront is correct when latency stems from geographically distant users repeatedly fetching static or cacheable content, not from saturated instance CPU.
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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.