AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 596

A company manages an application that stores data on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ DB instance. Increases in traffic are causing performance problems. The company determines that database queries are the primary reason for the slow performance.

What should a solutions architect do to improve the application's performance?

Answer options

• A. Serve read traffic from the Multi-AZ standby replica.
• B. Configure the DB instance to use Transfer Acceleration.
• C. Create a read replica from the source DB instance. Serve read traffic from the read replica.
• D. Use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose between the application and Amazon RDS to increase the concurrency of database requests.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Creating an Amazon RDS read replica allows you to offload read traffic from the primary DB instance, which directly addresses performance issues caused by heavy query workloads. The standby replica in a Multi-AZ deployment is passive and cannot accept read connections, making option A incorrect. Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration is not applicable to RDS, and Kinesis Data Firehose is designed for streaming data ingestion rather than scaling relational database queries.