AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (SOA-C03) — Question 54

A company’s reporting job that used to run in 15 minutes is now taking an hour to run. An application generates the reports. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances and extracts data from an Amazon RDS for MySQL database.
A CloudOps engineer checks the Amazon CloudWatch dashboard for the RDS instance and notices that the Read IOPS metrics are high, even when the reports are not running. The CloudOps engineer needs to improve the performance and the availability of the RDS instance.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Configure an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of the RDS instance. Update the reporting job to query the ElastiCache cluster.
• B. Deploy an RDS read replica. Update the reporting job to query the reader endpoint.
• C. Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution. Set the RDS instance as the origin. Update the reporting job to query the CloudFront distribution.
• D. Increase the size of the RDS instance.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because deploying an RDS read replica can offload read operations from the primary database, thus improving performance and availability. Option A, while helpful for caching, does not directly address the underlying database performance issue. Option C is not suitable as CloudFront is meant for web content delivery, not database queries. Option D may help but doesn't resolve the root cause of high Read IOPS.