AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 406

An administrator is responding to an alarm that reports increased application latency. Upon review, the Administrator notices that the Amazon RDS Aurora database frequently runs at 100% CPU utilization. The application is read heavy and does frequent lookups of a product table.
What should the Administrator do to reduce the application latency?

Answer options

• A. Move the product table to Amazon Redshift and use an interleaved sort key
• B. Add Aurora Replicas and use a Reader Endpoint for product table lookups
• C. Move the product table to Amazon CloudFront and set the cache-control headers to public
• D. Use Auto Scaling to add extra Aurora nodes and set a trigger based on CPU utilization

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Offloading read traffic from the primary Amazon RDS Aurora instance to Aurora Replicas is the most effective way to resolve high CPU utilization caused by a read-heavy workload. Utilizing the Reader Endpoint ensures that read queries for the product table are load-balanced across these replicas, thereby reducing response times. Amazon Redshift is designed for complex analytical queries rather than frequent transactional lookups, and Amazon CloudFront cannot natively host relational database tables.