AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Test

Which AWS service provides the ability to automatically manage and scale EC2 instances?

1. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

2. AWS CloudFormation

3. AWS Auto Scaling

4. AWS Systems Manager

The correct answer is: AWS Auto Scaling

The key function of AWS Auto Scaling is to automatically manage and scale EC2 instances based on defined policies and thresholds. It helps ensure that the application has the right number of EC2 instances running at any time, allowing for both performance optimization and cost efficiency. By continuously monitoring the application's performance, Auto Scaling can increase the number of instances during peak demand or decrease them during low usage periods. This dynamic adjustment is a critical feature for maintaining application availability without over-provisioning resources. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, while it does automate application deployment and environment management, does so within a platform as a service (PaaS) model. It integrates with Auto Scaling for handling underlying infrastructure but does not directly provide the broad scaling of EC2 instances without the user configuring it to use Auto Scaling features. AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows users to define and provision infrastructure as code. It does not manage or scale EC2 instances automatically; instead, it creates and manages resources based on the templates defined by the user. AWS Systems Manager is a management service that helps users manage their AWS resources and applications. While it provides capabilities for operational tasks, it does not specifically focus on the automatic scaling of EC2 instances like Auto Scaling does. Thus, the