AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 224

A financial services company is running a MySQL database on premises. The database holds details about all customer interactions and the financial advice that the company provided. The write traffic to the database is well known and consistent. However, the read traffic is subject to significant and sudden increases for end-of-month reporting. The database is becoming overloaded during these periods of heavy read activity.

The company decides to move the database to AWS. A database specialist needs to propose a solution in the AWS Cloud that will scale to meet the variable read traffic requirements without affecting the performance of write traffic. Scaling events must not require any downtime.

What is the MOST operationally efficient solution that meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Deploy a MySQL primary node on Amazon EC2 in one Availability Zone. Deploy a MySQL read replica on Amazon EC2 in a different Availability Zone. Configure a scheduled scaling event to increase the CPU capacity and RAM capacity within the MySQL read replica the day before each known traffic surge. Configure a scheduled scaling event to reduce the CPU capacity and RAM capacity within the MySQL read replica the day after each known traffic surge.
• B. Deploy an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster. Select a Cross-AZ configuration with an Aurora Replica. Create an Aurora Auto Scaling policy to adjust the number of Aurora Replicas based on CPU utilization. Direct all read-only reporting traffic to the reader endpoint for the DB cluster.
• C. Deploy an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ database as a write database. Deploy a second RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ database that is configured as an auto scaling read-only database. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to continuously replicate data from the write database to the read-only database. Direct all read-only reporting traffic to the reader endpoint for the read-only database.
• D. Deploy an Amazon DynamoDB database. Create a DynamoDB auto scaling policy to adjust the read capacity of the database based on target utilization. Direct all read traffic and write traffic to the DynamoDB database.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because Amazon Aurora with Auto Scaling allows for seamless scaling of read replicas based on CPU utilization, effectively managing sudden spikes in read traffic without affecting write operations. Options A and C involve more complex setups and manual scaling processes, which may lead to potential downtime, while option D does not utilize MySQL as required in the scenario.