A company that provisions job boards for a seasonal workforce is seeing an increase in traffic and usage. The backend services run on a pair of Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer

Migrating backend services to AWS Lambda involves significant development effort to re-architect the application, which goes against the 'least development effort' requirement.

Migrating backend services to AWS Lambda involves significant development effort, and DynamoDB global tables are primarily for multi-region replication and high availability, not the primary solution for single-region peak load scalability.

Using Auto Scaling groups for the backend EC2 instances automatically adjusts the number of servers to handle increased traffic during peak seasons with minimal configuration, and enabling DynamoDB auto scaling automatically manages the read and write capacity units to match varying demand, directly addressing slow traffic with the least development effort for an existing setup.

While Auto Scaling groups for EC2 are correct, introducing Amazon SQS for decoupling read and write operations requires application-level changes and development effort to integrate the queue, making it less 'least development effort' than simply enabling auto-scaling on existing services.