An application runs on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancer. The company expects a predictable spike in traffic each year during a holiday and wants the Auto Scaling group to proactively increase capacity to minimize user impact. Which strategy meets this requirement?

A recurring scheduled action is the most effective solution because it allows the Auto Scaling group to proactively increase capacity before the predictable holiday traffic spike. This ensures the application is ready to handle the increased load from the start, minimizing user impact. Creating a CloudWatch alarm based on CPU utilization is reactive; it would only scale up after the traffic spike has already begun and CPU utilization is high, potentially leading to performance degradation or outages. Increasing the minimum and maximum instance count manually is not ideal for recurring events and requires manual intervention, which is prone to error and not automated. Configuring an SNS notification for launch events is for monitoring purposes, not for proactively scaling the Auto Scaling group.