Question

An e-commerce company runs a web application on an EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Every business day, traffic spikes sharply at exactly 9:00 AM when a marketing email is sent, and the surge lasts about two hours. During this window, the application currently responds slowly because target tracking scaling reacts only after CloudWatch metrics breach thresholds, leaving a few minutes of under-provisioning. The company wants capacity available the moment the spike begins. What is the MOST effective way to address this?

Accepted Answer

Create a scheduled scaling action that increases the desired and minimum capacity shortly before 9:00 AM, and another to reduce it after the peak

Answer

Lower the target tracking value so the group scales out more aggressively throughout the day

Answer

Replace target tracking with step scaling using smaller CloudWatch evaluation periods

Answer

Enable detailed monitoring on the instances to shorten the metric collection interval to one minute