An organization is preparing for seasonal sales on its storefront web application.

When an organization can predict demand spikes (such as seasonal sales), the most cost-effective approach is to use scheduled scaling—a scaling configuration tied to a known timeline. In the CompTIA Cloud+ (CV0-004) objectives covering elasticity, scaling strategies, and cost optimization, scheduled scaling allows the business to increase capacity shortly before the surge begins and reduce it immediately after the event ends. This minimizes cost by ensuring resources run only for the required window, while still maintaining performance and availability during peak traffic.

Option A (least-connections) improves how traffic is distributed but does not add capacity; it cannot prevent resource exhaustion if the backend pool is undersized. Option C (reconfiguring to have more resources—vertical scaling) can help performance but often increases cost continuously and may introduce downtime or scaling limits. Option D (deploying additional compute in advance) can meet the requirement, but it may waste money if instances remain overprovisioned longer than necessary. Therefore, enabling a scheduled scaling configuration for the identified timeline best meets the need at minimal cost.