CLF-C02 - Cloud Technology and Services - Section 3.4

Identify AWS compute services, recognising appropriate uses of Amazon EC2 instance types, auto scaling for elasticity and the purpose of load balancers.

Identify the AWS compute services relevant to common workloads, matching EC2 instance families - such as compute-optimised, memory-optimised, and general-purpose - to their intended use cases. Recognise that Auto Scaling adjusts capacity to match demand for elasticity, and that Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming traffic across healthy targets.

Amazon EC2EC2 instance typesAuto scalingElastic Load Balancing

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleCloud Technology and Servicesmedium

An engineer combines Elastic Load Balancing with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for a fluctuating web application. Which statement best describes how these two services work together?

  • AThe load balancer decides how many instances to run, and Auto Scaling caches static content close to users at edge locations worldwide
  • BThe load balancer stores the application data on durable volumes, and Auto Scaling encrypts every request before it reaches an instance
  • CAuto Scaling provides the private network for the instances, and the load balancer resolves the application domain name to instance addresses
  • DAuto Scaling adjusts the number of instances with demand, and the load balancer spreads incoming traffic across the healthy instances Correct
Auto Scaling changes how many EC2 instances run with demand while Elastic Load Balancing spreads traffic across the healthy ones. The two services are complementary: Auto Scaling launches or terminates instances so the fleet matches demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes incoming requests across the current set of healthy instances, so the application stays responsive as capacity changes.

Why A is wrong: Auto Scaling sets the instance count rather than caching content, so this swaps the two roles and adds a caching task neither service performs here.

Why B is wrong: Load balancers do not store application data and Auto Scaling does not encrypt requests, so this misstates the purpose of both services.

Why C is wrong: A VPC provides the network and Route 53 resolves domain names, so neither described task belongs to Auto Scaling or the load balancer.

Why D is correct: Auto Scaling changes how many instances run as demand varies, while the load balancer distributes requests across whichever healthy instances exist.

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