AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 296

A company is using Amazon Aurora MySQL as the database for its retail application on AWS. The company receives a notification of a pending database upgrade and wants to ensure upgrades do not occur before or during the most critical time of year. Company leadership is concerned that an Amazon RDS maintenance window will cause an outage during data ingestion.
Which step can be taken to ensure that the application is not interrupted?

Answer options

• A. Disable weekly maintenance on the DB cluster.
• B. Clone the DB cluster and migrate it to a new copy of the database.
• C. Choose to defer the upgrade and then find an appropriate down time for patching.
• D. Set up an Aurora Replica and promote it to primary at the time of patching.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

AWS allows administrators to defer pending maintenance actions for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora, ensuring that disruptive updates do not occur during critical business periods. Disabling weekly maintenance entirely is not possible, and cloning or promoting replicas is unnecessary and does not address the scheduled maintenance on the active cluster. Deferring the upgrade allows the company to plan and execute the patching during a scheduled maintenance window that minimizes impact.