ACloud Guru Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam

Which service assists in automatically scaling your EC2 instances based on incoming traffic demands?

1. Elastic Beanstalk

2. Auto Scaling Group

3. CloudWatch

4. DynamoDB

The correct answer is: Auto Scaling Group

The Auto Scaling Group service is designed specifically to automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in response to varying levels of incoming traffic and demand. This feature is crucial for maintaining application availability and ensuring cost-effectiveness. When set up, Auto Scaling Groups monitor the performance and health of your EC2 instances, automatically adding instances during periods of high demand and removing them when traffic decreases. This capability helps maintain a balance between performance and cost, ensuring that resources are only used when necessary. Using Auto Scaling Groups effectively allows businesses to handle sudden spikes in traffic without manual intervention, providing a seamless user experience and optimizing resource utilization. The integration of Auto Scaling Groups with Amazon CloudWatch can further enhance monitoring and set triggers based on specific metrics, but it is the Auto Scaling functionality itself that adjusts the instance count autonomously, based on pre-defined criteria. In contrast, while Elastic Beanstalk facilitates the deployment of applications and can include scaling features, it is not exclusively dedicated to the automatic scaling of EC2 instances. CloudWatch is primarily a monitoring service that tracks metrics and logs, which can influence Auto Scaling decisions but does not itself scale instances. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database service, not related to the scaling of EC2 instances.