AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 518

Application developers have noticed that a production application is very slow when business reporting users run large production reports against the Amazon
RDS instance backing the application. The CPU and memory utilization metrics for the RDS instance do not exceed 60% while the reporting queries are running.
The business reporting users must be able to generate reports without affecting the application's performance.
Which action will accomplish this?

Answer options

• A. Increase the size of the RDS instance.
• B. Create a read replica and connect the application to it.
• C. Enable multiple Availability Zones on the RDS instance.
• D. Create a read replica and connect the business reports to it.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica and routing the heavy read-only reporting queries to it offloads the resource contention from the primary database instance, ensuring the production application remains responsive. Scaling the instance size or enabling Multi-AZ does not isolate the reporting workload from the write-heavy production database. Pointing the main application to a read replica is incorrect because the application requires write access, which standard read replicas do not support.