AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 376

A company is preparing for a marketing campaign that will increase traffic to a new web application. The application uses Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda for the application logic. The application stores relevant user data in an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster that has one Aurora Replica. Database queries for the application are 5% write and 95% read.

What should a SysOps administrator do to scale the database when traffic increases?

Answer options

• A. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling to add or remove Aurora Replicas in the cluster based on the average CPU utilization of the Aurora Replicas.
• B. Configure Aurora Auto Scaling to increase or decrease the size of the Aurora Replicas based on the average CPU utilization of the Aurora Replicas.
• C. Configure AWS Auto Scaling to monitor the Aurora cluster. Configure AWS Auto Scaling to add or remove Aurora Replicas in the cluster based on the average CPU utilization of the primary instance.
• D. Configure AWS Auto Scaling to monitor the Aurora cluster. Configure AWS Auto Scaling to add or remove Aurora Replicas in the cluster based on the average CPU utilization of the existing Aurora Replica.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Since the database workload is highly read-intensive (95% read), scaling the read capacity by adding more Aurora Replicas is the most effective solution. Aurora Auto Scaling natively manages the number of Aurora Replicas in a cluster based on average CPU utilization, making Option A the correct choice. Options B, C, and D are incorrect because Aurora Auto Scaling does not scale instance sizes dynamically, and AWS Auto Scaling is not configured based on the primary instance's CPU or a single replica's CPU for this purpose.