Effective Scaling Techniques for Slow-Performing Web Applications

Scale Your Application for Improved Performance

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Question

You are a Devops engineer for your company.

The company hosts a web application that is hosted on a single EC2 Instance.

The end users are complaining of slow response times for the application.

Which of the following can be used to effectively scale the application?

Answers

Explanations

Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer

A. B. C. D.

Answer - A.

The AWS Documentation mentions the below.

When you use Auto Scaling, you can automatically increase the size of your Auto Scaling group when demand goes up and decrease it when demand goes down.

As Auto Scaling adds and removes EC2 instances, you must ensure that the traffic for your application is distributed across all of your EC2 instances.

The Elastic Load Balancing service automatically routes incoming web traffic across such a dynamically changing number of EC2 instances.

Your load balancer acts as a single point of contact for all incoming traffic to the instances in your Auto Scaling group.

For more information on Autoscaling and ELB, please refer to the below link:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/latest/userguide/autoscaling-load-balancer.html

The best option to effectively scale the web application and improve response times is to use Autoscaling Groups to launch multiple instances and place them behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). Option A is the correct answer.

Here's why:

Autoscaling Groups are designed to automatically scale the number of EC2 instances running based on predefined criteria. In this case, you can set up rules to automatically launch new instances when certain metrics (such as CPU utilization or network traffic) reach a certain threshold. By launching multiple instances and distributing the load across them, you can improve the performance and reduce response times for end-users.

Additionally, an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can be used to distribute traffic across multiple EC2 instances, providing a highly available and fault-tolerant architecture. The ELB will distribute incoming requests across the instances in the Autoscaling Group, ensuring that the workload is balanced and that each instance is not overwhelmed with traffic.

Option B is incorrect because it refers to using Autoscaling launch configurations, which define the configuration settings for new instances that are launched by an Autoscaling Group. However, it does not address the need for an ELB to distribute traffic across multiple instances.

Option C is incorrect because Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ is a database solution that provides high availability and data durability, but it does not address the need for scaling the web application to improve performance.

Option D is incorrect because it refers to using CloudFormation to deploy the application again with Amazon RDS Multi-AZ, which again only addresses the database aspect of the application and does not address the need for scaling the web application to improve performance.