SAA-C03 Question 291
Single answerA company is designing a new application that requires high performance and scalability. The application will have a read-intensive access pattern, with thousands of requests per second primarily retrieving data. Which of the following solutions would be the MOST cost-effective and scalable for this use case?
- A
Store the data in an Amazon RDS instance and use read replicas to handle the read traffic.
- B
Use Amazon DynamoDB with on-demand capacity mode and enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX).
- C
Store the data in Amazon S3 and use S3 Select to optimize data retrieval.
- D
Store the data in an Amazon EBS volume attached to an EC2 instance, and scale the EC2 instance vertically.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: B
Explanation
For a read-intensive workload with thousands of requests per second, Amazon DynamoDB with DAX is the most cost-effective and scalable solution. DynamoDB is designed to handle high throughput, and DAX provides an in-memory caching layer to further reduce latency for read operations. While other options like RDS with read replicas could work, they are typically less cost-effective and scalable compared to DynamoDB with DAX.
- A. Incorrect.
This is a viable option for handling read-intensive workloads. Amazon RDS read replicas can offload read traffic from the primary database. However, the solution might become costly and less scalable over time compared to DynamoDB with DAX.
- B. Correct.
This is the correct answer. Amazon DynamoDB is highly scalable and cost-effective for read-intensive workloads, and enabling DAX provides in-memory caching to further improve read performance and reduce latency.
- C. Incorrect.
While Amazon S3 is scalable, it does not provide the low-latency, high-throughput characteristics needed for this use case. S3 Select is useful for querying specific data from large objects but is not optimized for thousands of read requests per second.
- D. Incorrect.
This option is not scalable or cost-effective for read-intensive workloads. Scaling an EC2 instance vertically is limited by hardware constraints and does not offer the elasticity needed to handle thousands of requests per second.