AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 310

A database specialist is working on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance that is experiencing application performance issues due to the addition of new workloads. The database has 5 ׀¢׀’ of storage space with Provisioned IOPS. Amazon CloudWatch metrics show that the average disk queue depth is greater than
200 and that the disk I/O response time is significantly higher than usual.
What should the database specialist do to improve the performance of the application immediately?

Answer options

• A. Increase the Provisioned IOPS rate on the storage.
• B. Increase the available storage space.
• C. Use General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage with burst credits.
• D. Create a read replica to offload Read IOPS from the DB instance.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

A high disk queue depth combined with increased disk I/O response times indicates that the storage subsystem is constrained by I/O capacity. Increasing the Provisioned IOPS rate directly resolves this bottleneck by allowing the storage to handle more concurrent I/O operations per second. Changing to gp2, adding storage capacity, or setting up a read replica will not resolve the immediate I/O capacity issues on the primary database as effectively or rapidly.