AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 381

A company has developed a new video game as a web application. The application is in a three-tier architecture in a VPC with Amazon RDS for MySQL. In the database layer several players will compete concurrently online. The game's developers want to display a top-10 scoreboard in near-real time and offer the ability to stop and restore the game while preserving the current scores.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Set up an Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached cluster to cache the scores for the web application to display.
• B. Set up an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster to compute and cache the scores for the web application to display.
• C. Place an Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the web application to cache the scoreboard in a section of the application.
• D. Create a read replica on Amazon RDS for MySQL to run queries to compute the scoreboard and serve the read traffic to the web application.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is ideal for real-time leaderboards because it supports sorted sets to automatically compute and maintain rankings, while also offering data persistence to save and restore state. Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached lacks persistence and built-in sorting capabilities, making it unsuitable for this use case. CloudFront caching and RDS Read Replicas do not provide the real-time computation or persistence features required for this gaming scenario.