AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 803

A company is migrating a three-tier application to AWS. The application requires a MySQL database. In the past, the application users reported poor application performance when creating new entries. These performance issues were caused by users generating different real-time reports from the application during working hours.

Which solution will improve the performance of the application when it is moved to AWS?

Answer options

• A. Import the data into an Amazon DynamoDB table with provisioned capacity. Refactor the application to use DynamoDB for reports.
• B. Create the database on a compute optimized Amazon EC2 instance. Ensure compute resources exceed the on-premises database.
• C. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with multiple read replicas. Configure the application to use the reader endpoint for reports.
• D. Create an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster. Configure the application to use the backup instance of the cluster as an endpoint for the reports.

Correct answer: C

Explanation

Creating an Amazon Aurora MySQL Multi-AZ DB cluster with read replicas allows reporting traffic to be offloaded to the reader endpoint, which isolates read-heavy queries from the primary writer instance and prevents write performance degradation. Refactoring to Amazon DynamoDB (Option A) is complex and unnecessary for this relational workload. Deploying on EC2 (Option B) does not scale read capacity independently, and Aurora does not support using backup/standby instances directly as reporting endpoints (Option D).