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Difficulty: EasyPerformance and Scalability Optimization

A digital marketing firm is launching a flash sale campaign for a major retail event. The campaign website is expected to receive an immediate burst of 5×1065 \times 10^6 page views within the first 1010 minutes of the launch. The current architecture consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) routing traffic to an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances. What pre-launch action should the solutions architect take to ensure the application does not experience dropped connections or latency spikes at the start of the event?

  1. Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer with the expected traffic profile, and configure scheduled scaling actions for the Auto Scaling group.Answer
  2. B
    Rely on the default auto-scaling behavior of the Application Load Balancer to dynamically scale out as the traffic arrives during the first few minutes.
  3. C
    Deploy an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ database and route the read traffic directly to the RDS standby replica during the initial traffic spike.
  4. D
    Configure a very short cooldown period on the Auto Scaling group's target tracking scaling policy to ensure instances scale out as fast as possible.

Answer

Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer with the expected traffic profile, and configure scheduled scaling actions for the Auto Scaling group.
The correct action is to contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer and schedule scaling for the Auto Scaling group. This combination ensures that both the ingress tier (ALB) and the application tier (EC2) have sufficient capacity provisioned in advance of the flash sale, avoiding latency and connection drop issues.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the traffic pattern.
The application expects an immediate, massive burst of 5×1065 \times 10^6 page views within 1010 minutes, which is a classic flash-crowd scenario.
Understanding the flash nature of the traffic helps rule out reactive scaling mechanisms which are too slow to respond.
2
Evaluate the ingress tier scaling requirements.
The Application Load Balancer (ALB) must be pre-warmed by AWS Support to handle the immediate burst without dropping connections.
ALBs scale automatically but require time to handle multi-million request spikes. Pre-warming prepares the ALB capacity in advance.
3
Evaluate the backend tier scaling requirements.
Configure scheduled scaling actions to launch backend EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group prior to the event start.
Scheduled scaling ensures capacity is online and bootstrapped before the traffic spike begins, preventing latency during instance startup.

Key Concept

ELB Pre-warming and Scheduled Scaling for Flash Traffic
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Topics

Performance and Scalability Optimization

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