Question #1432
An online retail platform operates a three-tier architecture on AWS, with web servers on EC2, an application tier, and a database tier. During seasonal sales, the application tier becomes overloaded, leading to delayed order confirmation emails and slower response times for user requests. The company wants to decouple email processing to improve application performance and minimize administrative efforts.
What should a solutions architect recommend to address these requirements?
Provision additional EC2 instances in the application tier specifically for email processing.
Integrate Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) into the application tier to handle email delivery.
Use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to publish email notifications and subscribe relevant services.
Implement an Auto Scaling group for the application tier to dynamically adjust capacity based on email processing load.
Explanation
The correct answer is B because:
- Amazon SES is a managed service designed for email delivery, offloading the email processing workload from the application tier. This decoupling ensures the application tier focuses on user requests, improving response times.
- Why not A/D: Adding EC2 instances (A) or Auto Scaling (D) keeps email processing coupled to the application tier, failing to address the root cause. Scaling also increases administrative overhead.
- Why not C: While SNS (C) decouples notifications, it requires additional services (e.g., Lambda) to process emails via SES, adding complexity. SES directly handles email delivery with minimal setup.
Key Points: Decoupling stateless tasks (like emails) using managed services (SES) improves scalability and reduces operational effort. SES simplifies email handling without managing infrastructure.
Answer
The correct answer is: B