A Finance Company Is Running Its Business-Critical Application on Current-Generation

question 208

Multiple Choice

A finance company is running its business-critical application on current-generation Linux EC2 instances. The application includes a self-managed MySQL database performing heavy I/O operations. The application is working fine to handle a moderate amount of traffic during the month. However, it slows down during the final three days of each month due to month-end reporting, even though the company is using Elastic Load Balancers and Auto Scaling within its infrastructure to meet the increased demand. Which of the following actions would allow the database to handle the month-end load with the LEAST impact on performance?

• A) Pre-warming Elastic Load Balancers, using a bigger instance type, changing all Amazon EBS volumes to GP2 volumes.
• B) Performing a one-time migration of the database cluster to Amazon RDS, and creating several additional read replicas to handle the load during end of month.
• C) Using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda to change the type, size, or IOPS of Amazon EBS volumes in the cluster based on a specific CloudWatch metric.
• D) Replacing all existing Amazon EBS volumes with new PIOPS volumes that have the maximum available storage size and I/O per second by taking snapshots before the end of the month and reverting back afterwards.

---

Definitions:

After-Tax Discount Rate

The discount rate used in financial calculations that reflects the net cost of capital after accounting for the effects of taxes.

Discount Factor

A factor by which a future cash flow is multiplied to obtain its present value.

After-Tax Discount Rate

The interest rate used in discounted cash flow analysis to calculate the present value of future cash flows after accounting for taxes.

Income Tax Rate

The rate at which taxes are levied on an individual or company's income.