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Difficulty: MediumOptimizing Network Performance and Latency

A global SaaS platform hosts its consumer-facing application on Amazon EC2 instances in private subnets across two AWS Regions: us-east-1 and eu-west-1. The application uses Application Load Balancers (ALBs) to distribute traffic. Users in Asia and South America are experiencing high latency and connection timeouts during peak utilization hours. Additionally, the internal microservices in both regions need to resolve each other's DNS queries securely and with minimal latency. An upcoming marketing event is expected to increase traffic by 10 times the current peak within a few minutes. Which two actions should the solutions architect recommend to optimize network performance and reduce latency? (Select two.)

  1. Deploy AWS Global Accelerator to route user traffic over the AWS global network, onboarding traffic at the closest Edge Location to minimize latency and TCP connection establishment time.Answer
  2. Request AWS Support to pre-warm the ALBs in both regions prior to the marketing event to handle the sudden traffic surge without dropping packets or causing queuing latency.Answer
  3. C
    Establish internal DNS resolution by creating a Route 53 Private Hosted Zone (PHZ) in the primary region's VPC, and configure the EC2 instances in the secondary region's VPC to resolve queries via public DNS servers to bypass cross-VPC PHZ association.
  4. D
    Consolidate outbound internet traffic from the private EC2 instances in each region through a single NAT Gateway deployed in the primary Availability Zone to optimize routing and simplify firewall rules.
  5. E
    Deploy AWS Transit Gateway and configure a Direct Connect Gateway to establish transitive VPC-to-VPC routing between the two regions, routing replication traffic over a Direct Connect public virtual interface (VIF) to bypass the AWS global backbone.

Answer

Deploy AWS Global Accelerator to route user traffic over the AWS global network backbone, and request AWS Support to pre-warm the ALBs in both regions prior to the high-volume marketing event.
Deploying AWS Global Accelerator ensures that global user traffic is routed over the high-speed, congestion-free AWS global network backbone from the nearest Edge Location, minimizing latency and packet loss. Additionally, requesting ALB pre-warming from AWS Support before a scheduled traffic surge ensures that the load balancers have sufficient capacity to handle the peak traffic immediately without causing latency spikes or dropped connections due to scaling delays.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the user entry point and global latency issues.
Identify that users in distant regions (Asia and South America) experience high latency due to public internet routing jitter and TCP handshake overhead.
Onboarding traffic closer to the user using Anycast IPs with AWS Global Accelerator minimizes the path over the public internet.
2
Address the upcoming 10x traffic spike constraint.
Recognize that standard ALB scaling is gradual and cannot handle a sudden 10-fold traffic surge instantly, which would lead to connection failures and high queuing latency.
Requesting ALB pre-warming configures the load balancers to handle the peak capacity from the start of the event.
3
Evaluate internal DNS and egress configurations.
Confirm that Private Hosted Zones must be associated with all target VPCs to avoid DNS resolution failure, and that NAT Gateways should be deployed per Availability Zone to prevent cross-AZ latency.
Eliminating cross-AZ hops and public routing paths optimizes internal network latency and throughput.

Key Concept

Optimizing global ingress paths with AWS Global Accelerator and pre-empting load balancer scaling limitations during massive traffic surges.
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Topics

Optimizing Network Performance and Latency