AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 586

A gaming company has a web application that displays scores. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores data in an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. Users are starting to experience long delays and interruptions that are caused by database read performance. The company wants to improve the user experience while minimizing changes to the application's architecture.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon ElastiCache in front of the database
• B. Use RDS Proxy between the application and the database
• C. Migrate the application from EC2 instances to AWS Lambda
• D. Migrate the database from Amazon RDS for MySQL to Amazon DynamoDB

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Using Amazon ElastiCache in front of the Amazon RDS for MySQL database caches frequent read queries, which significantly reduces the read load on the database and improves latency with minimal application changes. Amazon RDS Proxy helps with connection pooling but does not cache read queries to offload database reads. Migrating to AWS Lambda or Amazon DynamoDB would require significant code and architectural changes, violating the requirement to minimize changes.