AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design High-Performing ArchitecturesHard
A financial services company is migrating a critical, high-transactional database from on-premises to AWS. The database requires extremely low latency (sub-millisecond) for reads and writes, high I/O operations per second (IOPS), and must scale to handle millions of transactions per second. Data durability and transactional consistency are paramount. The team is looking for a fully managed solution.
- AAmazon RDS for PostgreSQL with Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS)
- BAmazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- CAmazon DynamoDB
- DAmazon Aurora with Aurora Serverless v2
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Amazon Aurora with Aurora Serverless v2
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, offering up to 5x the performance of standard MySQL and 3x the performance of standard PostgreSQL. Aurora Serverless v2 provides instant, fine-grained scaling for demanding workloads, which, combined with Aurora's core performance, delivers the required sub-millisecond latency and high IOPS for millions of transactions.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. While RDS PIOPS offers high performance, Aurora's architecture provides superior scalability and performance for extreme transactional workloads, especially with Serverless v2.
- B. DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database, suitable for specific use cases but not designed for the extreme transactional relational performance required here.
- C. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, excellent for scale and low latency, but the requirement for 'transactional consistency' (implying ACID properties typical of relational databases) and the migration from a traditional database suggests a relational solution is preferred if performance matches.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora that instantly scales database capacity up or down based on application demand, providing fine-grained capacity adjustments.
- Instant, fine-grained scaling for demanding workloads.
- Pay-per-second billing for database capacity.
- Compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
- Offers Aurora's high performance and durability.
Memory trick: Aurora's Apex for Extreme SQL.