Understanding the Requirement: The company anticipates a spike in traffic during a holiday and wants to ensure the Auto Scaling group can handle the increased load without impacting performance.

Analysis of Options:

CloudWatch Alarm: This reacts to spikes based on metrics like CPU utilization but does not proactively scale before the anticipated demand.

Recurring Scheduled Action: This allows the Auto Scaling group to scale up based on a known schedule, ensuring additional capacity is available before the expected spike.

Increase Min/Max Instances: This could result in unnecessary costs by maintaining higher capacity even when not needed.

SNS Notification: Alerts on scaling events but does not proactively manage scaling to prevent performance issues.

Best Solution for Proactive Scaling:

Create a recurring scheduled action: This approach ensures that the Auto Scaling group scales up before the peak demand, providing the necessary capacity proactively without manual intervention.