AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Cost-Optimized ArchitecturesEasy
A global e-commerce company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL as its primary database. During peak shopping seasons, the read traffic to the database significantly increases, causing performance bottlenecks. The company wants to improve read performance and offload read traffic from the primary instance without modifying the application code extensively, and also minimize costs. Which solution meets these requirements MOST cost-effectively?
- AEnable Multi-AZ deployment for the Amazon RDS instance.
- BCreate Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to use them for read operations.
- CUpgrade the primary Amazon RDS instance to a larger instance type.
- DMigrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB for better scalability.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to use them for read operations.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas are specifically designed to offload read traffic from the primary database instance, improving read performance and scalability. This is a cost-effective solution as read replicas can be scaled independently and do not require extensive application code changes if the application can be configured to direct reads to them.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Multi-AZ deployment provides high availability and disaster recovery, but it does not directly improve read scalability or offload read traffic from the primary instance.
- C. Upgrading the primary instance would increase costs for both read and write operations, and might still become a bottleneck during extreme peaks.
- D. Migrating to DynamoDB is a significant architectural change that would require extensive application re-writes and is not a cost-effective solution for simply improving read performance of an existing RDS MySQL database.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas
Copies of your primary Amazon RDS database instance that are used to offload read traffic, improving read performance and scalability for read-heavy workloads.
- Asynchronous replication from primary to replicas.
- Can be promoted to standalone database instances if needed.
- Supports cross-Region and cross-AZ replication.
- Ideal for read-heavy applications and reporting queries.
Memory trick: Read Replicas are like having multiple copies of a book to share, so everyone can read at once.