An e-commerce platform sees traffic surge during holiday sales. It needs EC2 instances added automatically as demand rises and removed as demand falls. Which AWS capability provides this?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Auto Scaling is the service that owns instance count: policies tied to metrics like CPU or request count launch instances during spikes and terminate them as load recedes, matching capacity to demand both directions. It is a capacity-control service, not a traffic or content service.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Load balancing spreads incoming requests across whatever instances exist; it never increases or decreases the instance count itself.
- C. CloudFormation turns templates into provisioned resources — a creation tool with no ability to respond dynamically to load changes over time.
- D. CloudFront caches content at edge locations close to users; it accelerates delivery without any role in adding or removing EC2 instances.