AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 381

A company has a large dataset for its online advertising business stored in an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance in a single Availability Zone. The company wants business reporting queries to run without impacting the write operations to the production DB instance.

Which solution meets these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Deploy RDS read replicas to process the business reporting queries.
• B. Scale out the DB instance horizontally by placing it behind an Elastic Load Balancer.
• C. Scale up the DB instance to a larger instance type to handle write operations and queries.
• D. Deploy the DB instance in multiple Availability Zones to process the business reporting queries.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Deploying Amazon RDS read replicas offloads read-heavy reporting queries from the primary database instance, ensuring that write performance is not degraded. Multi-AZ standby instances are used for disaster recovery and cannot accept active read traffic, while scaling up the instance type still risks resource contention between reads and writes on a single instance. Additionally, standard Amazon RDS instances cannot be placed behind an Elastic Load Balancer to scale out database writes horizontally.