Question

A media company hosts a popular news website on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer in a single Region. During breaking-news events, traffic spikes cause the instances to become overloaded serving repeated requests for the same static images, CSS, and JavaScript files, degrading page load times for global users. The team wants to reduce load on the origin and improve latency for visitors worldwide with minimal application changes. Which solution best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB and configure caching behaviors so static assets are served from edge locations.

Answer

Increase the size of each EC2 instance (vertical scaling) to handle more concurrent connections during traffic spikes.

Answer

Place an Amazon SQS queue between the ALB and the EC2 instances to buffer incoming static asset requests.

Answer

Enable cross-Region read replicas of the backend database to reduce the load caused by static asset requests.