AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 486

A company has migrated a two-tier application from its on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud. The data tier is a Multi-AZ deployment of Amazon RDS for
Oracle with 12 ׀¢׀’ of General Purpose SSD Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage. The application is designed to process and store documents in the database as binary large objects (blobs) with an average document size of 6 MB.
The database size has grown over time, reducing the performance and increasing the cost of storage. The company must improve the database performance and needs a solution that is highly available and resilient.
Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Reduce the RDS DB instance size. Increase the storage capacity to 24 TiB. Change the storage type to Magnetic.
• B. Increase the RDS DB instance size. Increase the storage capacity to 24 TiB. Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS.
• C. Create an Amazon S3 bucket. Update the application to store documents in the S3 bucket. Store the object metadata in the existing database.
• D. Create an Amazon DynamoDB table. Update the application to use DynamoDB. Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate data from the Oracle database to DynamoDB.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Storing large binary objects (blobs) directly in a relational database like Amazon RDS is inefficient and costly. Offloading these 6 MB documents to Amazon S3—which is highly durable, scalable, and cost-effective—while keeping only the metadata in the RDS database significantly improves database performance and reduces storage costs. Other options like scaling RDS storage or migrating to DynamoDB are either cost-prohibitive, perform poorly, or fail due to DynamoDB's 400 KB item size limit.