AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 335

A company is running a multi-tier web application on AWS. The application runs its database tier on Amazon Aurora MySQL. The application and database tiers are in the us-east-1 Region. A database administrator who regularly monitors the Aurora DB cluster finds that an intermittent increase in read traffic is creating high CPUutilization on the read replica and causing increased read latency of the application.
What should a solutions architect do to improve read scalability?

Answer options

• A. Reboot the Aurora DB cluster.
• B. Create a cross-Region read replica
• C. Increase the instance class of the read replica.
• D. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling for the read replica.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Aurora Auto Scaling dynamically adjusts the number of Aurora Replicas in response to changes in workload, such as CPU utilization, which directly addresses intermittent spikes in read traffic. Rebooting the cluster does not resolve capacity issues, and creating a cross-Region replica is designed for disaster recovery or regional latency rather than handling local spikes. Manually increasing the instance class is a static scaling approach that does not automatically adapt to fluctuating traffic patterns.