AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 781

A company has an application that runs on a single Amazon EC2 instance. The application uses a MySQL database that runs on the same EC2 instance. The company needs a highly available and automatically scalable solution to handle increased traffic.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Deploy the application to EC2 instances that run in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Create an Amazon Redshift cluster that has multiple MySQL-compatible nodes.
• B. Deploy the application to EC2 instances that are configured as a target group behind an Application Load Balancer. Create an Amazon RDS for MySQL cluster that has multiple instances.
• C. Deploy the application to EC2 instances that run in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer. Create an Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL cluster for the database layer.
• D. Deploy the application to EC2 instances that are configured as a target group behind an Application Load Balancer. Create an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster that uses the MySQL connector.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

To achieve high availability and automatic scaling for the application tier, deploying EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer is necessary. For the database tier, Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL automatically scales database capacity up or down based on application demand, making it the ideal highly available and scalable solution. Other options either use incorrect database technologies like Redshift (data warehousing) or Redis (caching), or lack the automated scaling capabilities of Aurora Serverless.