AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 111

An ecommerce company is running a multi-tier application on AWS. The front-end and backend tiers both run on Amazon EC2, and the database runs on Amazon
RDS for MySQL. The backend tier communicates with the RDS instance. There are frequent calls to return identical datasets from the database that are causing performance slowdowns.
Which action should be taken to improve the performance of the backend?

Answer options

• A. Implement Amazon SNS to store the database calls.
• B. Implement Amazon ElastiCache to cache the large datasets.
• C. Implement an RDS for MySQL read replica to cache database calls.
• D. Implement Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to stream the calls to the database.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B, as implementing Amazon ElastiCache allows for caching frequently accessed datasets, which significantly improves performance by reducing the number of calls to the database. Option A is incorrect because Amazon SNS is designed for messaging, not for caching. Option C, while it may help by offloading read requests, does not address caching the data itself. Option D is not suitable since Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is used for data streaming, not for enhancing database read performance.