What should a solutions architect recommend to ensure the application is able to handle the workload and avoid downtime?
Configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the ALB.
Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization.
Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule.
Configure Amazon ElastiCache to remove some of the workload from the EC2 instances.
Explanations:
Configuring a CloudFront distribution helps with caching static content and improving performance for web applications, but it does not address the underlying issue of CPU utilization during the batch process.
While an EC2 Auto Scaling simple scaling policy based on CPU utilization can help in some scenarios, it may not respond quickly enough to a sudden spike in CPU usage at the beginning of the month, leading to potential downtime.
A scheduled scaling policy allows for proactive scaling of the Auto Scaling group based on known workloads, such as the month-end financial calculations, ensuring that additional EC2 instances are available to handle the increased load.
Implementing Amazon ElastiCache can help reduce the load on EC2 instances by caching frequently accessed data, but it does not directly address the CPU spikes caused by the batch processing workload during month-end calculations.
I surmise that the answer is:
Configure an EC2 Auto Scaling scheduled scaling policy based on the monthly schedule.