AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)Cloud Technology and ServicesMedium
A company's primary Amazon RDS database is experiencing heavy read traffic from reporting applications, which is slowing down write performance for the main application. The company wants to offload read queries without changing the primary database's availability. Which solution should the company implement?
- ACreate an RDS Read Replica
- BEnable S3 Transfer Acceleration
- CMigrate to Amazon DynamoDB
- DEnable RDS Multi-AZ deployment
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Create an RDS Read Replica
An RDS Read Replica creates a read-only copy of the database that can handle read traffic such as reporting queries, reducing load on the primary instance without affecting its write availability.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. S3 Transfer Acceleration speeds up file uploads to S3, unrelated to database reads.
- C. Migrating to DynamoDB is a major architecture change unnecessary for simply offloading reads.
- D. Multi-AZ is for failover/high availability, not for offloading read traffic.
RDS Read Replica
A read-only copy of an RDS database used to offload read traffic from the primary instance, improving performance for read-heavy workloads.
- Uses asynchronous replication
- Can be promoted to a standalone database if needed
- Supported for MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and SQL Server
Memory trick: Read Replica = a photocopy for readers so the original stays free to write.