AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 29

A company is using an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster with an xlarge primary instance master and two large Aurora Replicas for high availability and read-only workload scaling. A failover event occurs and application performance is poor for several minutes. During this time, application servers in all Availability
Zones are healthy and responding normally.
What should the company do to eliminate this application performance issue?

Answer options

• A. Configure both of the Aurora Replicas to the same instance class as the primary DB instance. Enable cache coherence on the DB cluster, set the primary DB instance failover priority to tier-0, and assign a failover priority of tier-1 to the replicas.
• B. Deploy an AWS Lambda function that calls the DescribeDBInstances action to establish which instance has failed, and then use the PromoteReadReplica operation to promote one Aurora Replica to be the primary DB instance. Configure an Amazon RDS event subscription to send a notification to an Amazon SNS topic to which the Lambda function is subscribed.
• C. Configure one Aurora Replica to have the same instance class as the primary DB instance. Implement Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster cache management. Set the failover priority to tier-0 for the primary DB instance and one replica with the same instance class. Set the failover priority to tier-1 for the other replicas.
• D. Configure both Aurora Replicas to have the same instance class as the primary DB instance. Implement Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster cache management. Set the failover priority to tier-0 for the primary DB instance and to tier-1 for the replicas.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Option C is correct because configuring one Aurora Replica to match the primary instance class and managing the cache effectively ensures that performance is optimized during failover. Options A and D suggest configuring both replicas to the same instance class, which does not provide the same benefit as having at least one replica with a lower priority. Option B involves additional complexity and does not directly address the performance issue post-failover.