AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 268

A company hosts a production MySQL database on an Amazon Aurora single-node DB cluster. The database is queried heavily for reporting purposes. The DB cluster is experiencing periods of performance degradation because of high CPU utilization and maximum connections errors. A SysOps administrator needs to improve the stability of the database.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Aurora Replica node. Create an Auto Scaling policy to scale replicas based on CPU utilization. Ensure that all reporting requests use the read-only connection string
• B. Create a second Aurora MySQL single-node DB cluster in a second Availability Zone. Ensure that all reporting requests use the connection string for this additional node
• C. Create an AWS Lambda function that caches reporting requests. Ensure that all reporting requests call the Lambda function
• D. Create a multi-node Amazon ElastiCache cluster. Ensure that all reporting requests use the ElastiCache cluster. Use the database if the data is not in the cache.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Adding an Aurora Replica and using the reader endpoint offloads heavy reporting queries from the primary writer node, resolving high CPU and connection limit issues. Implementing Auto Scaling ensures that replica capacity dynamically adjusts to handle spikes in reporting traffic. Other options, like creating a separate DB cluster or using Lambda for caching, do not provide native read-scaling or are overly complex compared to Aurora's built-in replica scaling capabilities.