AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 546

A company wants to relocate its on-premises MySQL database to AWS. The database accepts regular imports from a client-facing application, which causes a high volume of write operations. The company is concerned that the amount of traffic might be causing performance issues within the application.
How should a solutions architect design the architecture on AWS?

Answer options

• A. Provision an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with Provisioned IOPS SSD storage. Monitor write operation metrics by using Amazon CloudWatch. Adjust the provisioned IOPS if necessary.
• B. Provision an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with General Purpose SSD storage. Place an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of the DB instance. Configure the application to query ElastiCache instead.
• C. Provision an Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) instance with a memory optimized instance type. Monitor Amazon CloudWatch for performance-related issues. Change the instance class if necessary.
• D. Provision an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system in General Purpose performance mode. Monitor Amazon CloudWatch for IOPS bottlenecks. Change to Provisioned Throughput performance mode if necessary.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon RDS for MySQL with Provisioned IOPS SSD storage is the ideal solution for handling high-volume write operations, as it delivers the predictable, high-performance I/O required for write-heavy workloads. Amazon ElastiCache is a caching service designed to optimize read-heavy workloads and does not alleviate write bottlenecks. Amazon DocumentDB is a NoSQL database that is not a direct replacement for a relational MySQL database, and Amazon EFS is a shared file system rather than a database service.