CLF-C02 Practice Question 21: Elastic Capacity
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 3 · question 1 of 10
Traffic to a concert-ticketing website jumps to many times its normal level for a few hours whenever a popular event goes on sale, then drops back. The company wants EC2 capacity to be added automatically during these peaks and removed afterward, so it is not paying for idle servers the rest of the time. What should it use?
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Answer:
This is elasticity: capacity that grows and shrinks with demand. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling keeps an Auto Scaling group between a minimum and maximum size, and its scaling policies launch or terminate instances as demand on the application increases or decreases. Adding capacity for peaks and removing it when demand is lower maintains availability while reducing cost, and Auto Scaling itself has no additional fee; you pay only for the resources it runs.
Option A spreads traffic across instances, but a load balancer does not change how many instances exist; a fixed fleet is either too small for the peak or idle the rest of the time. Option C scales vertically for the worst case, so the company pays for peak capacity around the clock, the over-provisioning the stem wants to avoid. Option D lowers the hourly price but commits the company to paying for that peak capacity for a one- or three-year term, even when it sits unused between sales.
Reference: What is Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?