AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 396

A user owns a MySQL database that is accessed by various clients who expect, at most, 100 ms latency on requests. Once a record is stored in the database, it is rarely changed. Clients only access one record at a time.
Database access has been increasing exponentially due to increased client demand. The resultant load will soon exceed the capacity of the most expensive hardware available for purchase. The user wants to migrate to AWS, and is willing to change database systems.
Which service would alleviate the database load issue and offer virtually unlimited scalability for the future?

Answer options

• A. Amazon RDS
• B. Amazon DynamoDB
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. AWS Data Pipeline

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service designed for single-digit millisecond latency at any scale, making it the perfect fit for high-throughput, single-record lookups. Unlike Amazon RDS, which has vertical scaling limitations based on instance sizes, DynamoDB offers seamless, virtually unlimited horizontal scaling. Amazon Redshift is optimized for analytical querying rather than low-latency transactional access, and AWS Data Pipeline is a data workflow orchestration service rather than a database.