A company is running a website on Amazon EC2 instances that are in an Auto Scaling group. When the website traffic increases, additional instances take several minutes to become available because of…

Question

Options

• AReduce the scaling thresholds so hat instances are added before traffic increases.
• BPurchase Reserved Instances to cover 100% of the maximum capacity of the Auto Scaling group.
• CUpdate the Auto Scaling group to launch instances that have a storage optimized instance type.
• DUse EC2 Image Builder to prepare an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that has pre-installed

• A
  14% (6)
• B
  7% (3)
• C
  74% (32)
• D
  5% (2)

Explanation

Important note: The marked correct answer (C) appears to be incorrect - the actual correct answer is D.

Option D is correct because the root cause of the delay is a long-running user data script that installs software at launch. By using EC2 Image Builder to create a "golden AMI" with the software pre-installed, new instances skip the installation step entirely and become available in seconds rather than minutes. This is the standard AWS pattern for reducing instance launch time caused by heavy bootstrapping.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A - Scaling earlier reduces how often you feel the delay, but doesn't eliminate the minutes-long wait; new instances still take just as long to become ready.
• B - Reserved Instances are a billing/cost optimization, not a performance feature; they launch at the same speed as On-Demand instances.
• C - Storage-optimized instance types improve disk I/O throughput (e.g., for databases or big data workloads), not software installation time; changing instance type doesn't address the user data script delay.

Memory tip: Whenever an exam question blames slow launches on a "user data script that installs software," the answer is almost always pre-bake it into a custom AMI. Think: "Bake once, launch many."

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