AWS Certified Solutions Architect – ProfessionalAccelerate Workload Migration and ModernizationMedium

An e-commerce company is migrating its monolithic application to AWS. The application currently experiences performance bottlenecks during peak sales events due to a shared database. The company wants to modernize the database layer to improve scalability, reduce latency for read-heavy workloads, and offload the primary database. Which AWS service should be used to address these specific requirements?

  1. AAmazon DynamoDB global tables
  2. BAmazon Aurora Serverless
  3. CAmazon ElastiCache for Redis
  4. DAmazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment
Show answer & explanation

Correct answer: C. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is an in-memory data store that significantly reduces latency for read-heavy workloads by caching frequently accessed data, thereby offloading the primary database and improving application scalability.

Why the other options are wrong

  • A. DynamoDB global tables provide multi-region replication for NoSQL data, but the question implies an existing relational database and a need to offload read-heavy workloads, not necessarily convert to NoSQL.
  • B. Amazon Aurora Serverless provides on-demand, auto-scaling relational database capacity but primarily focuses on simplifying database management and scaling compute, not specifically on offloading read-heavy workloads from a primary database through caching.
  • D. RDS Multi-AZ provides high availability and fault tolerance, but it does not inherently improve read scalability or offload the primary database for read-heavy workloads beyond a single read replica.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis

A fully managed in-memory data store service compatible with Redis, used for caching, session management, and real-time analytics to improve application performance.

  • Significantly reduces database load and latency for read-heavy operations.
  • Supports various data structures (strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets).
  • Offers high availability with replication and automatic failover.

Memory trick: ElastiCache Redis, Reads Rapidly

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