AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 22

A company runs an ecommerce application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances run in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones. The Auto Scaling group scales based on CPU utilization metrics. The ecommerce application stores the transaction data in a MySQL 8.0 database that is hosted on a large EC2 instance.
The database's performance degrades quickly as application load increases. The application handles more read requests than write transactions. The company wants a solution that will automatically scale the database to meet the demand of unpredictable read workloads while maintaining high availability.
Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon Redshift with a single node for leader and compute functionality.
• B. Use Amazon RDS with a Single-AZ deployment Configure Amazon RDS to add reader instances in a different Availability Zone.
• C. Use Amazon Aurora with a Multi-AZ deployment. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling with Aurora Replicas.
• D. Use Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached with EC2 Spot Instances.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

The correct answer, C, is ideal because Amazon Aurora with a Multi-AZ deployment offers high availability and can scale automatically with Aurora Replicas to handle unexpected read workloads. Option A is unsuitable as Amazon Redshift is optimized for data warehousing, not for transactional database loads. Option B lacks the necessary scaling capability for read requests, and option D focuses on caching rather than scaling database performance.