SOA-C03 - Reliability and Business Continuity - Section 2.3

Configure and troubleshoot Elastic Load Balancing and Amazon Route 53 health checks for highly available endpoints.

Configure Elastic Load Balancing target group health checks and connection draining to keep traffic away from unhealthy instances, and pair load balancers with Amazon Route 53 health checks for DNS-level failover. Troubleshoot 5xx errors and unhealthy target counts by interpreting access logs and health check thresholds.

Elastic Load BalancingRoute 53 health checksTarget group healthConnection draining

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleReliability and Business Continuitymedium

An EC2 Auto Scaling group sits behind an Application Load Balancer. Some instances keep running and pass their EC2 status checks, but the application process inside hangs and stops answering, so the ALB target health check marks the target unhealthy while the group leaves the instance in service. Separately, the application needs about three minutes to start after launch, and newly added instances are sometimes terminated as unhealthy before they finish booting. The team needs the group to replace genuinely hung instances automatically while giving fresh launches enough time to start. Which two configuration changes together meet this requirement? (Select TWO.)

  • ASet the Auto Scaling group health check type to ELB so the group uses the load balancer target health status, not only EC2 status checks, to decide when to replace an instance. Correct
  • BConfigure a health check grace period on the Auto Scaling group long enough to cover the application start time so new instances are not evaluated until after they have booted. Correct
  • CLeave the Auto Scaling group health check type as EC2 so the group acts only when the underlying instance fails its system or instance status checks.
  • DAttach a target tracking scaling policy on average CPU utilisation so the group adds capacity whenever the hung instances raise the fleet CPU average.
  • EEnable an Application Load Balancer connection draining timeout on the target group so hung instances finish in-flight requests before being removed.
Combine the ELB health check type with an adequate health check grace period so an Auto Scaling group replaces hung application instances yet still lets new instances finish booting. The group must learn about application failure from the load balancer rather than EC2 status checks, which is why the ELB health check type is required to catch a hung process. The grace period then prevents the group from terminating instances during their start-up window, so the two settings work together to give accurate health detection without a launch-and-terminate loop. CPU target tracking and connection draining address load and graceful removal, not health detection or boot protection, so neither satisfies the stated requirement.

Why A is correct: With the ELB health check type the group treats an unhealthy ALB target as an unhealthy instance and replaces the hung application automatically.

Why B is correct: The grace period suspends health evaluation while a new instance starts, stopping the group from terminating instances that are still warming up.

Why C is wrong: EC2 status checks pass while the application hangs, so this is tempting but it never detects the failed process and the instance stays in service.

Why D is wrong: Target tracking changes desired capacity for load, but it neither detects an unhealthy target nor protects a booting instance from premature termination.

Why E is wrong: Deregistration delay only delays closing connections on instances already being removed; it does not trigger replacement or grant boot time to new launches.

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