AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 466

A company is running a multi-tier ecommerce web application in the AWS Cloud. The application runs on Amazon EC2 Instances with an Amazon RDS MySQL
Multi-AZ DB instance. Amazon RDS is configured with the latest generation instance with 2,000 GB of storage in an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume. The database performance impacts the application during periods of high demand.
After analyzing the logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, a database administrator finds that the application performance always degrades when the number of read and write IOPS is higher than 6.000.
What should a solutions architect do to improve the application performance?

Answer options

• A. Replace the volume with a Magnetic volume.
• B. Increase the number of IOPS on the gp2 volume.
• C. Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume.
• D. Replace the 2,000 GB gp2 volume with two 1,000 GBgp2 volumes.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

A 2,000 GB gp2 volume delivers a baseline performance of 6,000 IOPS (calculated at 3 IOPS per GB), meaning it cannot scale beyond this threshold without increasing size. Upgrading the database storage to a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume allows the administrator to provision the exact high-performance IOPS required to handle peak demands. Other options like using Magnetic volumes would degrade performance further, and gp2 does not support manual IOPS configuration adjustments without scaling storage capacity.