AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 368

A company has launched an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. Most of the connections to the database come from serverless applications. Application traffic to the database changes significantly at random intervals. At times of high demand, users report that their applications experience database connection rejection errors.

Which solution will resolve this issue with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create a proxy in RDS Proxy. Configure the users’ applications to use the DB instance through RDS Proxy.
• B. Deploy Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached between the users’ applications and the DB instance.
• C. Migrate the DB instance to a different instance class that has higher I/O capacity. Configure the users’ applications to use the new DB instance.
• D. Configure Multi-AZ for the DB instance. Configure the users’ applications to switch between the DB instances.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon RDS Proxy is designed to manage database connection pools, which prevents serverless applications from exhausting the maximum connection limit of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance during traffic spikes. Implementing RDS Proxy requires minimal operational overhead and no architectural changes to the database. Other options like ElastiCache require application-level changes, while scaling the instance class or enabling Multi-AZ do not resolve the root connection pooling issue efficiently.