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Difficulty: MediumOptimizing Compute and Storage Performance

A company hosts a high-traffic gaming platform on AWS. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The session data and player profiles are stored in an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. During scheduled weekend tournament events, the platform experiences an instantaneous 10x spike in traffic. During these events, users encounter high latency and connection timeouts. Monitoring reveals that the ALB is dropping connections with HTTP 502 errors due to the sudden surge, and the RDS database experiences high read latency under the heavy query load. Which combination of actions should a solutions architect take to optimize the compute and storage performance of the architecture for these events?

  1. Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer before the scheduled tournaments, and migrate the database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with Aurora Replicas configured to scale horizontally to handle the read query spikes.Answer
  2. B
    Configure the Application Load Balancer to automatically scale using a target tracking scaling policy based on RequestCountPerTarget, and enable Amazon RDS Multi-AZ replication to allow the standby instance to handle the read query spikes.
  3. C
    Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer before the scheduled tournaments, and enable Amazon RDS Multi-AZ replication to distribute the read query spikes across the primary and standby database instances.
  4. D
    Configure the Application Load Balancer to automatically scale using a target tracking scaling policy based on RequestCountPerTarget, and migrate the database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with Aurora Replicas configured to scale horizontally to handle the read query spikes.

Answer

Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer before the scheduled tournaments, and migrate the database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with Aurora Replicas configured to scale horizontally to handle the read query spikes.
The correct option addresses both the load balancer scaling limitation and the database read bottleneck. An instantaneous 10x traffic spike cannot be absorbed in time by normal ALB auto-scaling, requiring pre-warming by AWS Support. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL read replicas can scale horizontally to handle the surge in read queries, whereas standard RDS Multi-AZ standby instances are passive and cannot serve read traffic.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Address the immediate frontend capacity bottleneck during sudden traffic spikes.
By pre-warming the Application Load Balancer (ALB) through AWS Support, the load balancer is pre-provisioned with the necessary capacity to handle the instantaneous 10x traffic surge without dropping connections.
Standard ELB auto-scaling is reactive and cannot scale rapidly enough to handle instantaneous surges, leading to HTTP 502 errors.
2
Optimize the database storage and compute layer for read-heavy query surges.
Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and create Aurora Replicas to serve read traffic.
Amazon Aurora Replicas share the same underlying storage volume as the primary instance, minimizing replication lag, and allow horizontal scaling of read capacity.

Key Concept

Handling instantaneous load spikes on ALBs and scaling database read workloads using Aurora Replicas.
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Topics

Optimizing Compute and Storage Performance