AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 304

An application reads and writes data to an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. A new reporting dashboard needs read-only access to the database. When the application and reports are both under heavy load, the database experiences performance degradation. A database specialist needs to improve the database performance.
What should the database specialist do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a read replica of the DB instance. Configure the reports to connect to the replication instance endpoint.
• B. Create a read replica of the DB instance. Configure the application and reports to connect to the cluster endpoint.
• C. Enable Multi-AZ deployment. Configure the reports to connect to the standby replica.
• D. Enable Multi-AZ deployment. Configure the application and reports to connect to the cluster endpoint.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica offloads the read-heavy reporting traffic from the primary DB instance, which directly addresses the performance issues. Multi-AZ standby replicas in Amazon RDS are strictly for high availability and disaster recovery, meaning they cannot accept read traffic. Additionally, cluster endpoints are a feature of Amazon Aurora and do not apply to standard Amazon RDS for MySQL instances.