AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 18

A financial services company has a web application that serves users in the United States and Europe. The application consists of a database tier and a web server tier. The database tier consists of a MySQL database hosted in us-east-1. Amazon Route 53 geoproximity routing is used to direct traffic to instances in the closest Region. A performance review of the system reveals that European users are not receiving the same level of query performance as those in the United
States.
Which changes should be made to the database tier to improve performance?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the database to Amazon RDS for MySQL. Configure Multi-AZ in one of the European Regions.
• B. Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB. Use DynamoDB global tables to enable replication to additional Regions.
• C. Deploy MySQL instances in each Region. Deploy an Application Load Balancer in front of MySQL to reduce the load on the primary instance.
• D. Migrate the database to an Amazon Aurora global database in MySQL compatibility mode. Configure read replicas in one of the European Regions.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

The correct answer is D because migrating to an Amazon Aurora global database allows for improved performance due to its capability to handle cross-region replication and low-latency read replicas in Europe. Option A, while improving availability with Multi-AZ, does not address the performance issue for European users. Option B introduces DynamoDB, which is a different database type and does not directly resolve the MySQL performance concerns. Option C does not effectively manage the database load and could lead to increased complexity without addressing the performance disparity.