AWS Solutions Architect Associate Practice Test

Disable ads (and more) with a membership for a one time $2.99 payment

Study for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate Test with our engaging quizzes. Utilize flashcards and multiple-choice questions, each with hints and explanations to enhance your understanding. Get exam-ready today!

Each practice test/flash card set has 50 randomly selected questions from a bank of over 500. You'll get a new set of questions each time!

Practice this question and more.

What could cause poor user experience in a web application using cookie-based sessions during increased load?

The ELB DNS record's TTL is set too high.
The new instances are not being added to the ELB during the Auto Scaling cooldown period.
The website uses the dynamic content feature of Amazon CloudFront which is keeping connections alive to the ELB.
The ELB is continuing to send requests with previously established sessions to the same backend instances rather than spreading them out to the new instances.

The correct answer is: The ELB is continuing to send requests with previously established sessions to the same backend instances rather than spreading them out to the new instances.

In a web application using cookie-based sessions, each user's session is often tied to a particular backend instance. When session information is stored in cookies, it means that the application expects to serve requests associated with a specific session from the same instance that created the session. This design can lead to a problem during periods of increased load if new instances are launched to handle that load, but the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) continues to route requests from a user’s session to the original instance. When the ELB maintains session affinity (often referred to as sticky sessions), it directs all traffic from a user to the same instance. If that instance becomes overloaded and can’t handle additional requests efficiently, the user experiences poor performance, as their requests are not distributed across other, potentially less-loaded instances that could handle them better. This situation can negatively impact overall user experience, especially under high load conditions when more instances should ideally be utilized to balance the traffic more effectively across them. The ability of the ELB to adaptively manage which instance handles which session becomes crucial for maintaining performance, and sheer reliance on the original instance at load times leads to bottleneck scenarios.