AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 373

A company hosts a three-tier web application that includes a PostgreSQL database. The database stores the metadata from documents. The company searches the metadata for key terms to retrieve documents that the company reviews in a report each month. The documents are stored in Amazon S3. The documents are usually written only once, but they are updated frequently.

The reporting process takes a few hours with the use of relational queries. The reporting process must not prevent any document modifications or the addition of new documents. A solutions architect needs to implement a solution to speed up the reporting process.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of change to the application code?

Answer options

• A. Set up a new Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) cluster that includes a read replica. Scale the read replica to generate the reports.
• B. Set up a new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster that includes an Aurora Replica. Issue queries to the Aurora Replica to generate the reports.
• C. Set up a new Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB instance. Configure the reporting module to query the secondary RDS node so that the reporting module does not affect the primary node.
• D. Set up a new Amazon DynamoDB table to store the documents. Use a fixed write capacity to support new document entries. Automatically scale the read capacity to support the reports.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Migrating to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL requires minimal application code changes because it maintains full compatibility with the existing PostgreSQL database and relational queries. Utilizing an Aurora Replica for the reporting queries offloads the heavy read traffic from the primary instance, ensuring that document modifications and additions are not blocked. Other options like DocumentDB or DynamoDB are NoSQL databases that would require extensive code rewrites, while Amazon RDS Multi-AZ secondary standby instances do not support active read traffic.