AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 356

A company has an application that uses an Amazon RDS for MariaDB Multi-AZ database. The application becomes unavailable for several minutes every time the database experiences a failover during a planned maintenance event.

What should a SysOps administrator do to reduce the downtime of the application during failover?

Answer options

• A. Create an RDS for MariaDB DB cluster that has multiple writer instances. Configure the application to retry failed queries on another primary node during maintenance events.
• B. Configure the RDS maintenance window settings to pool connections while a failover is in process.
• C. Configure an Amazon ElastiCache write-through cache for the database. Configure the application to connect to the cache instead of directly to the database.
• D. Create an RDS proxy that is associated with the database. Configure the application to connect to the proxy instead of directly to the database.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Amazon RDS Proxy minimizes application downtime during failover by maintaining active client connections and automatically routing traffic to the newly promoted standby instance without requiring DNS changes. Other options like RDS for MariaDB do not support multi-writer clusters, and Amazon ElastiCache cannot prevent downtime caused by database connection drops during failovers.