AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 972

A gaming company has a web application that displays scores. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The application stores data in an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. Users are starting to experience long delays and interruptions that are caused by database read performance. The company wants to improve the user experience while minimizing changes to the application’s architecture.

What should a solutions architect do to meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon ElastiCache in front of the database.
• B. Use RDS Proxy between the application and the database.
• C. Migrate the application from EC2 instances to AWS Lambda.
• D. Migrate the database from Amazon RDS for MySQL to Amazon DynamoDB.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Implementing Amazon ElastiCache in front of the Amazon RDS for MySQL database allows the application to cache frequent read queries, which significantly reduces read latency and offloads traffic from the database with minimal code changes. Migrating to Amazon DynamoDB or AWS Lambda would require extensive application rewrites, failing the requirement to minimize architectural changes. Amazon RDS Proxy manages database connection pooling rather than caching read queries directly, making it less effective for resolving read performance bottlenecks.