AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 650

A company has an ordering application that stores customer information in Amazon RDS for MySQL. During regular business hours, employees run one-time queries for reporting purposes. Timeouts are occurring during order processing because the reporting queries are taking a long time to run. The company needs to eliminate the timeouts without preventing employees from performing queries.
What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create a read replica. Move reporting queries to the read replica.
• B. Create a read replica. Distribute the ordering application to the primary DB instance and the read replica.
• C. Migrate the ordering application to Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity.
• D. Schedule the reporting queries for non-peak hours.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica offloads the resource-intensive reporting queries from the primary database, resolving the processing timeouts while allowing users to query data in real-time. Distributing write traffic to a read replica is not supported as replicas are read-only, and migrating to Amazon DynamoDB would require a major application redesign. Scheduling queries for non-peak hours is incorrect because it restricts employees from running queries during their regular business hours.