AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 330

A gaming company is evaluating Amazon ElastiCache as a solution to manage player leaderboards. Millions of players around the world will complete in annual tournaments. The company wants to implement an architecture that is highly available. The company also wants to ensure that maintenance activities have minimal impact on the availability of the gaming platform.
Which combination of steps should the company take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Deploy an ElastiCache for Redis cluster with read replicas and Multi-AZ enabled.
• B. Deploy an ElastiCache for Memcached global datastore.
• C. Deploy a single-node ElastiCache for Redis cluster with automatic backups enabled. In the event of a failure, create a new cluster and restore data from the most recent backup.
• D. Use the default maintenance window to apply any required system changes and mandatory updates as soon as they are available.
• E. Choose a preferred maintenance window at the time of lowest usage to apply any required changes and mandatory updates.

Correct answer: A, E

Explanation

To achieve high availability and automatic failover for leaderboards, deploying Amazon ElastiCache for Redis with Multi-AZ and read replicas (Option A) is the recommended best practice. To minimize the impact of maintenance operations, choosing a custom maintenance window during off-peak hours (Option E) ensures updates occur when player activity is lowest. Memcached (Option B) lacks the advanced data structures like Sorted Sets needed for leaderboards, and a single-node Redis cluster (Option C) fails to provide high availability during outages.