SAA-C03 Question 512
Single answerA company uses an Amazon RDS MySQL database for their online transaction processing (OLTP) application. They are experiencing high read traffic that is slowing down performance. To scale their database for read-heavy workloads, what should they do?
- A
Create a read replica of the RDS database and configure the application to direct read queries to the replica.
- B
Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS database to automatically balance read traffic across multiple availability zones.
- C
Upgrade the RDS instance to a larger instance type to handle the increased read traffic.
- D
Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache the read queries and reduce the load on the RDS database.
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best solution for scaling read-heavy workloads in Amazon RDS is to use read replicas. Read replicas are designed to handle increased read traffic by creating replicas of the primary database that can serve read requests. This reduces the load on the primary database and improves overall performance.
- A. Correct.
Creating a read replica allows you to offload read operations from the primary database, improving performance for read-heavy workloads. This is the most suitable solution for the scenario described.
- B. Incorrect.
Multi-AZ deployment improves database availability and fault tolerance but does not address read scaling. It is not designed to offload read traffic.
- C. Incorrect.
Upgrading the RDS instance could temporarily address performance issues but does not effectively scale read traffic as the workload grows. It is also more expensive and less scalable than using read replicas.
- D. Incorrect.
Using Amazon ElastiCache can improve performance for certain read workloads but requires modifying the application to use the cache. In this scenario, the question focuses specifically on database replication solutions, making this option less relevant.