AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Cost-Optimized ArchitecturesMedium
A global e-commerce platform uses Amazon Aurora for its main transactional database. During peak sales events, the read replicas are often overwhelmed, leading to slow query performance for reporting and analytics. The company wants to offload these read-heavy, analytical queries to a more cost-effective solution without impacting the primary Aurora database's performance. Which AWS service should they use?
- AUse Amazon ElastiCache for reporting queries
- BIncrease the size of Aurora read replicas
- CMigrate analytical queries to Amazon Redshift
- DImplement Amazon DynamoDB for reporting data
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Migrate analytical queries to Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service optimized for analytical workloads and complex queries. Offloading read-heavy analytical queries from Aurora to Redshift ensures that the transactional database remains performant and provides a cost-effective solution for analytics.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Amazon ElastiCache is an in-memory caching service used to improve database performance for frequently accessed data, not for running complex analytical queries.
- B. Increasing Aurora read replica size would increase costs and might still struggle with complex analytical queries, as Aurora is optimized for OLTP, not OLAP.
- D. Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database suitable for high-performance, key-value and document workloads, not typically for complex analytical reporting.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, designed for analytical workloads and business intelligence.
- Optimized for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP).
- Columnar storage for efficient query performance.
- Scalable to petabytes of data.
- Integrates with various BI tools.
Memory trick: Different databases for different data needs, like tools in a toolbox.