AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 864

A web-based application is running in AWS. The application is using a MySQL Amazon RDS database instance for persistence. The application stores transactional data and is read-heavy. The RDS instance gets busy during the peak usage, which shows the overall application response times.
The SysOps Administrator is asked to improve the read queries performance using a scalable solution.
Which options will meet these requirements? (Choose two.)

Answer options

• A. Scale up the RDS instance to a larger instance size
• B. Enable the RDS database Multi-AZ option
• C. Create a read replica of the RDS instance
• D. Use Amazon DynamoDB instead of RDS
• E. Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache read queries

Correct answer: C, E

Explanation

To optimize a read-heavy RDS MySQL database, creating Read Replicas (Option C) allows the application to offload read queries from the primary database instance to one or more replicas. Additionally, implementing Amazon ElastiCache (Option E) caches frequent read queries in-memory, significantly reducing the load on the database. Multi-AZ (Option B) is for high availability and does not handle read traffic, while scaling up (Option A) is not a horizontally scalable solution, and migrating to DynamoDB (Option D) requires a complete application redesign.