AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – AssociateReliability and Business ContinuityMedium
A company is running a critical application on Amazon EC2 instances connected to an Amazon RDS MySQL database. The database is configured for Multi-AZ deployment. The application experiences occasional read-heavy spikes, causing increased latency on the primary database instance. The SysOps Administrator needs to offload read traffic from the primary database to improve application performance during peak loads, without increasing the cost excessively during off-peak times. Which solution should be implemented?
- ACreate an Amazon RDS Read Replica in a different AWS Region.
- BIncrease the instance size of the primary RDS database.
- CEnable Enhanced Monitoring on the RDS instance to identify bottlenecks.
- DCreate an Amazon RDS Read Replica in the same AWS Region.
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Create an Amazon RDS Read Replica in the same AWS Region.
Creating an Amazon RDS Read Replica in the same AWS Region allows the application to offload read traffic from the primary database instance, reducing its load and improving performance during read-heavy spikes. This also provides an endpoint specifically for reads, which can be scaled independently.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. A Read Replica in a different region introduces replication lag and is typically used for disaster recovery or global read access, not primarily for local read offloading to improve performance during spikes.
- B. Increasing the primary instance size is a vertical scaling approach which is more expensive, may require downtime, and doesn't specifically address offloading read traffic to a separate endpoint.
- C. Enhanced Monitoring helps identify issues but does not directly offload read traffic or improve performance.
RDS Read Replicas
Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide an independent endpoint for read queries, allowing you to offload read traffic from your primary database instance and improve application performance.
- Asynchronously replicate data from the primary.
- Can be in the same or different AWS Region.
- Scalable independently from the primary instance.
- Used for read scaling and disaster recovery (cross-region).
Memory trick: Replicate reads, relieve the main, run faster.