Question

A media company runs a stateless web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in an Auto Scaling group. Traffic is unpredictable, with sudden spikes during breaking news events. The operations team currently manages capacity manually and often over-provisions to be safe, wasting money during quiet periods. They want the group to automatically maintain healthy performance while minimizing cost, using the simplest configuration to manage. Which scaling approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Configure a target tracking scaling policy that keeps average CPU utilization of the group at a defined target value.

Answer

Configure a scheduled scaling action that adds capacity every morning and removes it every evening.

Answer

Use a simple scaling policy that adds one instance whenever a CloudWatch alarm fires, with a long cooldown period.

Answer

Manually increase the desired capacity through the console whenever the team observes elevated traffic.