AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03)Design Cost-Optimized ArchitecturesMedium
A global e-commerce company uses Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as its primary database. During peak sales events, the read traffic significantly increases, causing performance bottlenecks. The company needs a cost-effective solution to handle the increased read load without modifying the application code or significantly increasing the primary instance size. What is the most appropriate solution?
- AImplement RDS Read Replicas for PostgreSQL.
- BMigrate the database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
- CUpgrade the primary RDS instance to a larger instance type.
- DEnable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Implement RDS Read Replicas for PostgreSQL.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas allow you to offload read traffic from your primary database instance, distributing the load across multiple replicas. This improves read performance and scalability without requiring application code changes, making it a cost-effective solution for read-heavy workloads.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. Migrating to Aurora is a significant architectural change and potentially more complex and costly than simply scaling reads with Read Replicas.
- C. Upgrading the primary instance increases costs for both read and write capacity, which is not optimal for read-specific bottlenecks.
- D. Multi-AZ deployment enhances availability and fault tolerance but does not scale read capacity; the standby replica does not serve read requests.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas
Copies of your primary Amazon RDS database instance that are used to offload read traffic, improving read scalability and performance. They can be created within the same AWS Region or across different Regions.
- Scale read operations beyond the capacity of a single database instance.
- Improve database performance for read-heavy applications.
- Can be promoted to a standalone database instance if the primary fails (manual process).
Memory trick: Read Replicas: More copies, less primary load, for your data stories.