Cost effectiveness context

[Kumar Mahadevan]

Review Mode Set 5 – AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional

An e-commerce platform experiences significant traffic spikes during peak shopping seasons, leading to performance bottlenecks and impacting user experience. The application is hosted on Amazon ECS and uses Amazon CloudFront as its CDN. The platform has two main modules: product browsing and checkout, with the browsing module experiencing substantially higher loads. Sessions are managed using JSON Web Tokens (JWT), which encodes user roles and access levels. This load imbalance causes performance issues, affecting overall availability.
A Solutions Architect needs to enhance scalability and reliability for both modules during high-traffic periods to maintain optimal performance and cost efficiency.

Which solution will most effectively address this challenge?

It depends on where are you looking for cost effectiveness – Design time(Refactoring) or runtime. For runtime Lambda will be definitely more cost effective than ECS. Also, you cannot assume that all e-comm applications have long running processes. More context needs to be provided here for selecting the correct answer.

[Nikee-TutorialsDojo]

Hello Kumar,

Thank you for your comment! When evaluating the best solution, you’re right in considering design-time and runtime factors. In this case, the key challenge in the question revolves around handling significant traffic spikes efficiently during peak shopping seasons while maintaining optimal performance and cost-efficiency.

The option says, “Create separate ECS services for browsing and checkout modules, each with its own auto-scaling configuration. Use CloudFront Functions to inspect JWT, route requests to the appropriate ECS service based on the requested module, user access level, and load.” is the most appropriate solution here because it focuses on runtime scalability by separating the browsing and checkout modules into independent ECS services, each with its own auto-scaling configuration. This allows the platform to handle varying loads for the browsing module, which experiences higher traffic while keeping the checkout module unaffected. Auto-scaling ECS services ensure that resources are allocated dynamically during high-traffic periods, optimizing performance without over-provisioning or under-provisioning.

While AWS Lambda is a cost-effective option for some workloads, especially for highly variable traffic or shorter processes, the architecture, in this case, likely involves more complex and sustained traffic for browsing and checkout modules, making ECS a better fit for managing these sustained loads. Additionally, refactoring to Lambda would require significant changes to the current architecture. It might not align well with the existing system’s design, leading to more complexity and potentially higher design-time costs.

Lastly, CloudFront Functions in the option effectively route requests based on user roles and access levels encoded in the JWT. This ensures that the browsing and checkout modules are intelligently handled, reducing unnecessary strain on either service, particularly the browsing module during high traffic.

So, the correct answer balances scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency during high-traffic periods, making it the best solution. We hope this explanation clarifies the reasoning behind the correct answer!

Feel free to reach out if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Nikee @ Tutorials Dojo