AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 349

A company uses a 100 GB Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server Single-AZ DB instance in the us-east-1 Region to store customer transactions. The company needs high availability and automatic recovery for the DB instance.

The company must also run reports on the RDS database several times a year. The report process causes transactions to take longer than usual to post to the customers’ accounts. The company needs a solution that will improve the performance of the report process.

Which combination of steps will meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Modify the DB instance from a Single-AZ DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment.
• B. Take a snapshot of the current DB instance. Restore the snapshot to a new RDS deployment in another Availability Zone.
• C. Create a read replica of the DB instance in a different Availability Zone. Point all requests for reports to the read replica.
• D. Migrate the database to RDS Custom.
• E. Use RDS Proxy to limit reporting requests to the maintenance window.

Correct answer: A, C

Explanation

Modifying the DB instance to a Multi-AZ deployment (Option A) provides the required high availability and automatic failover capabilities for Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server. Creating a read replica (Option C) and redirecting reporting queries to it offloads read traffic from the primary DB instance, resolving the transaction performance degradation. Restoring snapshots (Option B), migrating to RDS Custom (Option D), or using RDS Proxy (Option E) do not natively address both the high availability and reporting performance requirements.