AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 567

A financial services company launched a new application that uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. The company uses the application to track stock market trends. The company needs to operate the application for only 2 hours at the end of each week. The company needs to optimize the cost of running the database.

Which solution will meet these requirements MOST cost-effectively?

Answer options

• A. Migrate the existing RDS for MySQL database to an Aurora Serverless v2 MySQL database cluster.
• B. Migrate the existing RDS for MySQL database to an Aurora MySQL database cluster.
• C. Migrate the existing RDS for MySQL database to an Amazon EC2 instance that runs MySQL. Purchase an instance reservation for the EC2 instance.
• D. Migrate the existing RDS for MySQL database to an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster that uses MySQL container images to run tasks.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Migrating to Aurora Serverless v2 MySQL is the most cost-effective choice because it automatically scales database capacity based on actual usage, making it ideal for a workload that only runs for 2 hours per week. Provisioned options like standard Aurora MySQL or EC2 Reserved Instances would incur ongoing costs for idle time and are not optimized for highly intermittent workloads. Running MySQL on Amazon ECS introduces unnecessary operational complexity and management overhead without the automated scaling efficiencies of a serverless database.