AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) — Question 102

A finance company is running its business-critical application on current-generation Linux EC2 instances. The application includes a self-managed MySQL database performing heavy I/O operations. The application is working fine to handle a moderate amount of traffic during the month. However, it slows down during the final three days of each month due to month-end reporting, even though the company is using Elastic Load Balancers and Auto Scaling within its infrastructure to meet the increased demand.

Which of the following actions would allow the database to handle the month-end load with the LEAST impact on performance?

Answer options

• A. Pre-warming Elastic Load Balancers, using a bigger instance type, changing all Amazon EBS volumes to GP2 volumes.
• B. Performing a one-time migration of the database cluster to Amazon RDS, and creating several additional read replicas to handle the load during end of month.
• C. Using Amazon CloudWatch with AWS Lambda to change the type, size, or IOPS of Amazon EBS volumes in the cluster based on a specific CloudWatch metric.
• D. Replacing all existing Amazon EBS volumes with new PIOPS volumes that have the maximum available storage size and I/O per second by taking snapshots before the end of the month and reverting back afterwards.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

The correct answer is B because migrating to Amazon RDS and adding read replicas can effectively distribute the load, allowing the database to handle the increased demand during month-end reporting with minimal performance degradation. Options A, C, and D either increase costs significantly or do not address the underlying database performance issues adequately, making them less effective solutions for this scenario.