Table of Contents
Question
A SysOps administrator is responsible for a legacy, CPU-heavy application. The application can only be scaled vertically. Currently, the application is deployed on a single t3.large Amazon EC2 instance. The system is showing 90% CPU usage and significant performance latency after a few minutes. What change should be made to alleviate the performance problem?
A. Change the Amazon EBS volume to Provisioned IOPs.
B. Upgrade to a compute-optimized instance.
C. Add additional t2.large instances to the application.
D. Purchase Reserved Instances.
Answer
B. Upgrade to a compute-optimized instance.
Explanation
The correct answer is B. Upgrade to a compute-optimized instance.
A compute-optimized instance is a type of Amazon EC2 instance that provides high performance processors and enhanced networking capabilities. Compute-optimized instances are ideal for CPU-heavy applications that require high processing speed and low latency, such as gaming, scientific modeling, or batch processing.
Upgrading to a compute-optimized instance can alleviate the performance problem of the legacy application because:
- It can provide more CPU resources and power than a t3.large instance. A t3.large instance has 2 vCPUs and a baseline performance of 30% with bursts up to 100%. A compute-optimized instance, such as a c5.large, has 2 vCPUs and a consistent performance of 100%. This means that a compute-optimized instance can handle more CPU-intensive workloads and avoid throttling or performance degradation.
- It can support enhanced networking features, such as Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) or Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA). These features enable high bandwidth, low latency, and low jitter network performance for the application. They also support network protocols such as TCP/IP, UDP, and RDMA, which can improve the communication and data transfer efficiency of the application.
The other options are incorrect because:
- Option A is incorrect because changing the Amazon EBS volume to Provisioned IOPs would not address the CPU bottleneck of the application. Provisioned IOPs is a type of Amazon EBS volume that provides consistent and predictable performance for input/output operations per second (IOPS). Provisioned IOPs is suitable for applications that require high disk performance and low latency, such as databases or transactional workloads. However, it does not affect the CPU performance or capacity of the EC2 instance.
- Option C is incorrect because adding additional t2.large instances to the application would not work for a vertically scalable application. Vertical scaling is the process of increasing the capacity of an existing server by adding more CPU, memory, or disk resources. Horizontal scaling is the process of increasing the number of servers that run the same application. A vertically scalable application can only benefit from vertical scaling, not horizontal scaling. Adding more instances would not improve the performance or availability of the application.
- Option D is incorrect because purchasing Reserved Instances would not improve the performance of the application. Reserved Instances are a pricing model that allows you to reserve EC2 instances for a specific period of time (one or three years) and pay a lower hourly rate than On-Demand Instances. Reserved Instances can help you save money and ensure capacity for your application, but they do not affect the performance or configuration of your EC2 instances.
Therefore, the best solution to improve the performance of the legacy, CPU-heavy application that can only be scaled vertically is to upgrade to a compute-optimized instance.
Reference
- cpu – Why can’t we vertically scale a system infinitely? – Software Engineering Stack Exchange
- performance – Why won’t my CPU operate at its max potential even when my application (which utilize CPU’s resources) is lagging? – Super User
- Amazon EC2 Instance Types (amazonaws.cn)
- Compute – Amazon EC2 Instance Types – AWS
- Instance types – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Amazon EC2 instances – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
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