AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 516

A solutions architect is reviewing the resilience of an application. The solutions architect notices that a database administrator recently failed over the application's Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database writer instance as part of a scaling exercise. The failover resulted in 3 minutes of downtime for the application.

Which solution will reduce the downtime for scaling exercises with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Create more Aurora PostgreSQL read replicas in the cluster to handle the load during failover.
• B. Set up a secondary Aurora PostgreSQL cluster in the same AWS Region. During failover, update the application to use the secondary cluster's writer endpoint.
• C. Create an Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached cluster to handle the load during failover.
• D. Set up an Amazon RDS proxy for the database. Update the application to use the proxy endpoint.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon RDS Proxy reduces failover times for Aurora PostgreSQL by preserving client connections and queuing requests during database transitions, which requires minimal operational overhead. Options A and C do not address write availability during a writer failover. Option B introduces high operational complexity and latency in updating application configurations during a failover event.