AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 561

A company runs an application on AWS. The application receives inconsistent amounts of usage. The application uses AWS Direct Connect to connect to an on-premises MySQL-compatible database. The on-premises database consistently uses a minimum of 2 GiB of memory.

The company wants to migrate the on-premises database to a managed AWS service. The company wants to use auto scaling capabilities to manage unexpected workload increases.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST administrative overhead?

Answer options

• A. Provision an Amazon DynamoDB database with default read and write capacity settings.
• B. Provision an Amazon Aurora database with a minimum capacity of 1 Aurora capacity unit (ACU).
• C. Provision an Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 database with a minimum capacity of 1 Aurora capacity unit (ACU).
• D. Provision an Amazon RDS for MySQL database with 2 GiB of memory.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is the ideal choice because it is MySQL-compatible and automatically scales compute and memory capacity up and down based on demand, where 1 ACU corresponds to exactly 2 GiB of memory. Amazon RDS for MySQL does not scale dynamically without administrative intervention, and Amazon DynamoDB is a NoSQL database that would require extensive application refactoring. Standard provisioned Amazon Aurora does not support scaling using ACUs, which is a feature unique to the Serverless deployment model.