AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 383

Users of a company's internal web application recently experienced application performance issues for a brief period. The application includes frontend web servers that run in an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster. The application also includes a backend Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL DB cluster that includes one DB instance.

A SysOps administrator determines that the source of the performance issues was high utilization of the DB cluster. The single writer instance experienced more than 90% utilization for 11 minutes. The cause of the high utilization was an automated report that is scheduled to run one time each week.

What should the SysOps administrator do to ensure that users do not experience performance issues each week when the report runs?

Answer options

• A. Increase the size of the DB instance. Monitor the performance during the next scheduled run of the report.
• B. Add a reader instance. Change the database connection string of the report application to use the newly created reader instance.
• C. Add another writer instance. Change the database connection string of the report application to use the newly created writer instance.
• D. Configure auto scaling for the DB cluster. Set the minimum capacity units, maximum capacity units, and target utilization.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Adding an Aurora reader instance allows the read-heavy reporting workload to be offloaded from the primary writer instance, preserving its resources for the web application's users. Option C is incorrect because standard Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL clusters only support a single writer instance. Option A increases costs unnecessarily without isolating the analytical workload, while Option D is less effective than dedicated read replicas for segregating read-heavy reporting traffic.