A company hosts a monolithic web application on an Amazon EC2 instance. Application users have recently reported poor performance at specific times. Analysis of Amazon CloudWatch metrics shows that CP

Creating an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the web server ensures a consistent and ready-to-deploy template for new instances, which is essential for horizontal scaling. This AMI will be used by the Auto Scaling group to launch new, identical instances of the application.

Creating an Auto Scaling group and an Application Load Balancer is correct for improving performance and availability, but the choice incorrectly states 'to scale vertically.' Auto Scaling groups are designed for *horizontal* scaling (adding/removing instances) to distribute load and improve resilience.

While AWS Compute Optimizer can provide recommendations, simply obtaining a recommendation for horizontal scaling parameters does not implement the solution. The core issue of performance and availability is resolved by deploying an Auto Scaling group with an ALB and a proper AMI, not just by receiving a recommendation.

Creating an Auto Scaling group with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) enables horizontal scaling, distributing incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances. This prevents any single instance from being overwhelmed (solving 100% CPU), significantly improves application availability, and is a cost-effective strategy for web applications by scaling resources based on demand.