AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 612

A company is using a SQL database to store movie data that is publicly accessible. The database runs on an Amazon RDS Single-AZ DB instance. A script runs queries at random intervals each day to record the number of new movies that have been added to the database. The script must report a final total during business hours.
The company's development team notices that the database performance is inadequate for development tasks when the script is running. A solutions architect must recommend a solution to resolve this issue.
Which solution will meet this requirement with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Modify the DB instance to be a Multi-AZ deployment.
• B. Create a read replica of the database. Configure the script to query only the read replica.
• C. Instruct the development team to manually export the entries in the database at the end of each day.
• D. Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache the common queries that the script runs against the database.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica allows the read-heavy reporting script to run its queries without impacting the primary database used by the development team. While a Multi-AZ deployment (Option A) provides high availability, it does not offload read traffic from the primary instance. Implementing Amazon ElastiCache (Option D) would require significant application code changes to manage the cache, and manual exports (Option C) introduce high operational overhead.