AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 706

A company is running a multi-tier ecommerce web application in the AWS Cloud. The application runs on Amazon EC2 Instances with an Amazon RDS MySQL
Multi-AZ DB instance. Amazon RDS is configured with the latest generation instance with 2,000 GB of storage in a General Purpose SSD (gp3) Amazon Elastic
Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume. The database performance affects the application during periods of high demand.
A database administrator analyzes the logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and discovers that the application performance always degrades when the number of read and write IOPS is higher than 20,000.
What should a solutions architect do to improve the application performance?

Answer options

• A. Replace the volume with a magnetic volume.
• B. Increase the number of IOPS on the gp3 volume.
• C. Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume.
• D. Replace the 2,000 GB volume with two 1,000 GB gp3 volumes.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon RDS gp3 storage volumes have a maximum limit of 16,000 IOPS, meaning they cannot scale to meet the database's requirement of over 20,000 IOPS. Upgrading to Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes allows the database to achieve up to 256,000 IOPS, easily resolving the performance bottleneck. Other options like using magnetic storage or splitting the volumes are either performance-degrading or unsupported for RDS instances.