AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate — Question 390

An application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster that includes one Aurora Replica. The application's read performance degrades when there are more than 200 user connections. The number of user connections is approximately 180 on a consistent basis. Occasionally, the number of user connections increases rapidly to more than 200.

A SysOps administrator must implement a solution that will scale the application automatically as user demand increases or decreases.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Modify the DB cluster by increasing the Aurora Replica instance size.
• B. Modify the DB cluster by changing to serverless mode whenever the number of user connections exceeds 200.
• C. Migrate to a new Aurora DB cluster that has multiple writer instances. Modify the application's database connection string.
• D. Create an auto scaling policy that has a target value of 195 for the DatabaseConnections metric.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

Creating an Application Auto Scaling policy for Aurora Replicas using the DatabaseConnections metric allows the system to automatically add replicas as connection counts approach the degradation limit. Setting the target value to 195 ensures scaling occurs preemptively before reaching the 200-connection performance bottleneck. Other options either involve manual intervention, unnecessary migration overhead, or do not scale dynamically based on the specific connection metric.