AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 712

A company’s data platform uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The database has multiple read replicas and multiple DB instances across different Availability Zones. Users have recently reported errors from the database that indicate that there are too many connections. The company wants to reduce the failover time by 20% when a read replica is promoted to primary writer.

Which solution will meet this requirement?

Answer options

• A. Switch from Aurora to Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ cluster deployment.
• B. Use Amazon RDS Proxy in front of the Aurora database.
• C. Switch to Amazon DynamoDB with DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for read connections.
• D. Switch to Amazon Redshift with relocation capability.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon RDS Proxy resolves 'too many connections' errors by pooling and sharing database connections, reducing the memory and CPU overhead associated with creating new connections. Additionally, RDS Proxy bypasses traditional DNS cache TTL limits during a database failover, reducing Aurora failover times by up to 66% which easily satisfies the 20% reduction requirement. Other options like migrating to Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, or Redshift are disruptive architectural changes that are unnecessary for resolving these connection and failover issues.