AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Practice Exam

Which solution would likely alleviate the performance degradation of the application server?

1. Increase the instance size of the application server

2. Implement more application servers in the Auto Scaling group

3. Update the Security Groups to limit incoming traffic from the ELB

4. Add additional NAT instances for load balancing

The correct answer is: Update the Security Groups to limit incoming traffic from the ELB

The appropriate solution that would alleviate performance degradation of the application server is to implement more application servers in the Auto Scaling group. When an application experiences performance issues, it often results from increased load beyond the capacity of the existing resources. By adding more application servers to an Auto Scaling group, the environment becomes capable of distributing the incoming requests more evenly among a greater number of instances. This enhances the overall throughput and ensures that no single instance is overwhelmed by traffic. Auto Scaling also allows instances to be dynamically added or removed based on current demands, which means it can adjust to workload spikes efficiently. Implementing additional servers directly addresses the root cause of performance degradation related to load handling. While increasing the instance size might help in some situations, it could lead to higher costs and does not necessarily address the need for parallel processing, especially if the application is not optimized for vertical scaling. Updating Security Groups to limit incoming traffic from the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) could inadvertently block necessary traffic, potentially worsening performance. Lastly, adding additional NAT instances for load balancing isn't a typical strategy for alleviating application server performance directly; NAT instances are more about enabling outbound internet traffic for resources in a private subnet rather than improving application performance directly.