SAA-C03 Question 157
Single answerA company is running an e-commerce application backed by an Amazon RDS database. The application is experiencing high read traffic during peak shopping times, causing performance degradation. How can you improve the database performance while ensuring the main database remains writable?
- A
Add read replicas to the RDS database and configure the application to direct read queries to the replicas.
- B
Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS database to distribute read traffic across multiple Availability Zones.
- C
Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB to handle the increased read traffic.
- D
Scale up the RDS instance by using a larger instance type.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
Read replicas in Amazon RDS are designed to handle high read traffic by offloading read operations from the primary database to replicas, improving application performance. This solution is effective without interrupting write operations on the primary database. Multi-AZ is for high availability and failover, not for scaling reads. While scaling up or migrating to DynamoDB could also be considered, they are less efficient or more complex than simply adding read replicas in this scenario.
- A. Correct.
Adding read replicas allows you to offload read traffic from the primary database to replicas, improving performance while keeping the primary database writable.
- B. Incorrect.
Multi-AZ provides high availability and failover support but does not distribute read traffic. It is not appropriate for scaling read operations.
- C. Incorrect.
Migrating to DynamoDB could address scalability for reads, but it requires a significant re-architecture of the application and is not the most efficient solution for this specific scenario.
- D. Incorrect.
Scaling up the RDS instance might temporarily improve performance, but it does not address the specific issue of high read traffic. It also has limits and is less cost-effective compared to using read replicas.