Discover how AWS warm pools can help you quickly scale to meet rapid traffic surges for your web applications hosted on EC2 instances, by maintaining pre-initialized instances ready for immediate deployment.
Table of Contents
Question
A company has a public web application that experiences rapid traffic increases after advertisements appear on local television. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances that are in an Auto Scaling group. The Auto Scaling group is not keeping up with the traffic surges after an advertisement runs. The company often needs to scale out to 100 EC2 instances during the traffic surges.
The instance startup times are lengthy because of a boot process that creates machine-specific data caches that are unique to each instance. The exact timing of when the advertisements will appear on television is not known. A SysOps administrator must implement a solution so that the application can function properly during the traffic surges.
Which solution will meet these requirements?
A. Create e warm pool. Keep enough instances in the Stopped state to meet the increased demand.
B. Start 100 instances. Allow the boot process to finish running. Store this data on the instance store volume before stopping the instances.
C. Increase the value of the instance warmup time in the scaling policy
D. Use predictive scaling for the Auto Scaling group.
Answer
A. Create e warm pool. Keep enough instances in the Stopped state to meet the increased demand.
Explanation
Creating a warm pool of pre-initialized EC2 instances is the most suitable solution to handle rapid traffic surges and reduce instance startup times. The warm pool allows for instances to be kept in a Stopped state, ready to be quickly started and added to the Auto Scaling group when needed.
By keeping instances in the Stopped state, the boot process and the creation of machine-specific data caches have already been completed. When a traffic surge occurs, these pre-initialized instances can be started much faster than launching new instances from scratch. This approach minimizes the time required for instances to become fully operational and ready to handle the increased traffic.
To implement this solution, the SysOps administrator should:
- Create and maintain a warm pool of instances in the Stopped state, with a sufficient number to meet the anticipated demand during traffic surges (e.g., 100 instances).
- Configure the Auto Scaling group to launch instances from the warm pool when scaling out.
- Regularly refresh the warm pool by stopping instances that have been running for a while and launching new Stopped instances to replace them.
Other options are not suitable or do not fully address the requirements:
B. Storing the data on instance store volumes would not work well for a warm pool, as instance store volumes are ephemeral and their data is lost when the instance is stopped or terminated. C. Increasing the instance warmup time does not solve the lengthy startup times due to the boot process and data cache creation. D. Predictive scaling may not be effective since the exact timing of the traffic surges is not known.
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