Question

Difficulty: MediumIdentify design principles of the AWS Cloud

An online gaming portal manages player matchmaking and game lobby orchestration. The current architecture relies on a single monolithic server to run the matchmaking logic, store active session states, and send notification emails to players when a match is found. During peak tournament events, the system struggles to handle the load, resulting in delayed notifications and failed match setups. To align with AWS Cloud design principles, which of the following architectural changes should the portal implement? (Select TWO.)

  1. Use Amazon DynamoDB to externalize session state, allowing the matchmaking compute components to operate statelessly and scale independently.Answer
  2. Migrate the email notification subsystem to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), leveraging a managed service instead of maintaining custom mail server software.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy the monolithic matchmaking server on a single, highly-configured Amazon EC2 instance that remains running continuously to handle maximum potential user connections.
  4. D
    Store session states in the local memory of the matchmaking server and use sticky sessions to bind each player to that specific instance.
  5. E
    Configure a secondary duplicate monolithic server in a cold standby state and manually update its configuration files whenever a game update is released.

Answer

The portal should implement using Amazon DynamoDB to externalize session state for stateless compute scaling and migrating the email notification subsystem to Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to leverage managed services.
The correct architecture uses Amazon DynamoDB to store matchmaking session data externally, allowing the application tier to operate statelessly and scale horizontally (implementing loose coupling). It also utilizes Amazon SNS as a managed messaging service to handle notifications, removing the operational burden of managing a dedicated mail server (implementing services not servers).

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the bottlenecks in the monolithic setup, specifically state storage (local memory) and custom notification management.
Identify that statefulness prevents scaling and managing a custom email server adds unnecessary operational overhead.
AWS design principles advocate for stateless applications and offloading server management to managed services.
2
Select options that replace stateful components with external state stores and custom application code with managed services.
Amazon DynamoDB externalizes state (loose coupling), and Amazon SNS replaces custom notification infrastructure (services not servers).
This aligns the architecture with the core AWS design principles of loose coupling and utilizing managed services.

Key Concept

AWS Cloud Design Principles
Rate this question