AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Question
A company has deployed an application across multiple Availability Zones that relies on Amazon DynamoDB. Recently, the application experienced a sudden, unpredictable spike in traffic and began to receive ProvisionedThroughputExceededException errors. The company wants to ensure that the application can automatically handle similar unexpected traffic spikes in the future without manual intervention or throttling.
What should the solutions architect do to meet these requirements?
Configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms to notify operators when ConsumedReadCapacityUnits approaches the provisioned limit.
Request an AWS service quota increase for overall read and write capacity units for the account in the Region.
Manually increase the table's provisioned read and write capacity units to a higher value.
Change the DynamoDB table to on-demand capacity mode so that it automatically scales to accommodate traffic spikes.
Switching the table to on-demand capacity mode is the recommended way to accommodate sudden, unpredictable spikes. In on-demand mode, DynamoDB automatically and instantly scales to any previously reached traffic level and doubles new peaks, eliminating the need for capacity planning and preventing throttling for most workloads. Manually increasing provisioned capacity or requesting a service-quota increase still requires forecasting and can be quickly outpaced by another spike. CloudWatch alarms provide visibility but do not solve the throttling problem themselves.
AWS documentation calls on-demand the default and recommended throughput option that "automatically scales to accommodate the most demanding workloads" and explicitly notes that auto scaling/manual scaling is "not recommended as a solution for dealing with spikey workloads."
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