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Difficulty: MediumPerformance and Scalability Optimization

A logistics company is launching a new real-time package tracking API. During holiday seasons, the API experiences sudden, massive spikes in traffic (increasing by 1515-fold within 22 minutes) as users refresh their dashboards. The backend reads tracking data from an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The system must maintain low read latency during these spikes without impacting database write performance. Which strategy should the solutions architect recommend to handle these spikes at both the load balancer and database layers?

  1. A
    Rely on the Application Load Balancer's (ALB) native automatic scaling to adjust to traffic surges, and deploy Amazon Aurora Replicas with Aurora Auto Scaling to distribute the query load.
  2. Request Application Load Balancer (ALB) pre-warming from AWS Support prior to the holiday season, and deploy Amazon Aurora Replicas with Aurora Auto Scaling to distribute the query load.Answer
  3. C
    Request Application Load Balancer (ALB) pre-warming from AWS Support prior to the holiday season, and configure an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment to route read-only query traffic to the standby replica.
  4. D
    Rely on the Application Load Balancer's (ALB) native automatic scaling to adjust to traffic surges, and configure an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ deployment to route read-only query traffic to the standby replica.

Answer

Request Application Load Balancer (ALB) pre-warming from AWS Support prior to the holiday season, and deploy Amazon Aurora Replicas with Aurora Auto Scaling to distribute the query load.
The correct strategy requires pre-warming the ALB to handle the immediate 1515-fold spike in traffic, combined with deploying Aurora Replicas and using Aurora Auto Scaling to handle the read query load without affecting the primary writer instance.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the load balancer scaling characteristics.
Identify that the Application Load Balancer (ALB) scales in response to traffic over time but cannot handle an instantaneous 1515-fold spike within 22 minutes. AWS Support must pre-warm the ALB to prevent dropped connections.
Sudden traffic spikes exceed the normal rate of ALB scaling.
2
Analyze the database read scalability requirements.
Select Amazon Aurora Replicas with Aurora Auto Scaling to handle the increased read load, rather than relying on RDS Multi-AZ standbys which cannot serve traffic.
Aurora Replicas support read scaling and Aurora Auto Scaling dynamically adds and removes replicas as needed.

Key Concept

Scaling Application Load Balancers for flash traffic and scaling relational database reads using Aurora Replicas.
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Topics

Performance and Scalability Optimization

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