AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 320

An application allows users at a company's headquarters to access product data. The product data is stored in an Amazon RDS MySQL DB instance. The operations team has isolated an application performance slowdown and wants to separate read traffic from write traffic. A solutions architect needs to optimize the application's performance quickly.
What should the solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Change the existing database to a Multi-AZ deployment. Serve the read requests from the primary Availability Zone.
• B. Change the existing database to a Multi-AZ deployment. Serve the read requests from the secondary Availability Zone.
• C. Create read replicas for the database. Configure the read replicas with half of the compute and storage resources as the source database.
• D. Create read replicas for the database. Configure the read replicas with the same compute and storage resources as the source database.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Creating read replicas is the standard AWS best practice to separate read traffic from write traffic and resolve database performance bottlenecks. The replicas must be configured with the same compute and storage resources as the source database to prevent replication lag and ensure they can handle the incoming read workload. Multi-AZ deployments are intended for high availability and disaster recovery, and the secondary standby instance cannot be used to serve read traffic.