AWS Certified Database – Specialty — Question 343

A company plans to migrate a MySQL-based application from an on-premises environment to AWS. The application performs database joins across several tables and uses indexes for faster query response times. The company needs the database to be highly available with automatic failover.
Which solution on AWS will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Deploy an Amazon RDS DB instance with a read replica.
• B. Deploy an Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instance.
• C. Deploy Amazon DynamoDB global tables.
• D. Deploy multiple Amazon RDS DB instances. Use Amazon Route 53 DNS with failover health checks configured.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ DB instances provide high availability and automatic failover out-of-the-box with minimal operational overhead, making Option B the correct choice. Amazon DynamoDB (Option C) is a NoSQL database that does not natively support relational joins, which the application requires. Deploying read replicas (Option A) or setting up custom Route 53 failover across multiple RDS instances (Option D) introduces significantly higher operational complexity and lacks the seamless, built-in failover mechanism of Multi-AZ.