A company is launching a flash sale campaign where web traffic is expected to instantly spike from 100 requests per second to 150,000 requests per second. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). Which configuration should a Solutions Architect recommend to ensure the load balancer handles this sudden traffic surge without dropping initial requests?
- Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer with the expected traffic metrics, and configure the EC2 Auto Scaling group to scale out proactively before the campaign starts.Answer
- BRely on the Application Load Balancer's default automatic scaling capabilities to dynamically adjust to the sudden influx of traffic while the EC2 Auto Scaling group scales out using CPU utilization policies.
- CEnable Multi-AZ deployment for the backend Amazon RDS instance and configure the application to send half of the read traffic to the standby replica instance to offload database queries.
- DDeploy an Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached cluster with multi-AZ replication enabled to cache database query results and provide session persistence during the flash sale.
Answer
Contact AWS Support to pre-warm the Application Load Balancer with the expected traffic metrics, and configure the EC2 Auto Scaling group to scale out proactively before the campaign starts.
Pre-warming the Application Load Balancer (ALB) is the standard AWS best practice when preparing for a predictable, massive, and instantaneous traffic surge. Because standard ALB scaling takes time, pre-warming ensures that sufficient resources are provisioned beforehand. Additionally, proactively scaling out the EC2 instances before the event begins ensures the application tier has the compute capacity ready to process the requests.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
ELB pre-warming and proactive capacity planning for flash traffic events
Estimated Time:1m 0s