Question

A SysOps administrator manages an EC2 Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer for a web application. The application experiences unpredictable, large traffic spikes where CPU utilization can jump from 40% to 90% within a minute. The current target tracking policy targeting 50% average CPU adds instances too slowly during these sudden bursts, causing brief periods of degraded performance. The administrator needs the scaling response to be more aggressive as the breach magnitude increases. Which scaling configuration change BEST addresses this requirement?

Accepted Answer

Replace the target tracking policy with a step scaling policy that adds progressively more instances as CPU exceeds higher thresholds.

Answer

Lower the target tracking policy's target value from 50% to 30% CPU utilization.

Answer

Add a scheduled scaling action to increase the desired capacity every hour.

Answer

Enable predictive scaling using machine learning forecasts of daily traffic patterns.