CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company wants to improve the resilience of their Amazon RDS database by ensuring that read traffic is distributed across multiple copies of the database and that a replica can be promoted if the primary fails. Which RDS feature enables this?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Multi-AZ with Read Replicas, assuming Multi-AZ also distributes read traffic, but Multi-AZ's standby is passive and only used for automatic failover, not for serving reads or manual promotion.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
RDS Read Replicas
Amazon RDS Read Replicas allow you to create one or more copies of your database instance that serve read traffic, offloading read queries from the primary DB instance. In the event of a primary failure, a Read Replica can be manually promoted to a standalone primary instance, providing resilience and continuity for read-heavy workloads. This directly matches the requirement to distribute read traffic and enable replica promotion.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
RDS Multi-AZ deployment
Why it's wrong here
A Multi-AZ deployment synchronously replicates every write to one or more standby instances in a different Availability Zone, and AWS automatically flips the DNS to a standby if the primary fails or requires maintenance. The standby is a hot, synchronized copy, but it is kept in a standby state and cannot accept any reads or writes; it only takes over during failover. Thus Multi-AZ improves availability and durability but does not increase read capacity or allow you to use the standby for reporting or analytics. Since the requirement is to reduce read load and provide a manual failover path, Multi-AZ alone is insufficient.
- ✓
RDS Read Replicas
Why this is correct
Read Replicas are asynchronous, write-ahead log (WAL) based copies of the primary database that can accept SELECT traffic, effectively distributing read workload and improving overall application throughput. You can create multiple replicas, in the same or different Regions, to scale reads globally and reduce latency for distributed users. If the primary fails, you can manually promote a replica to a standalone production instance, though promotion is not automatic. This combination of read scaling and a manual failover path directly matches the stated requirement, making it the correct choice.
- ✗
RDS Automated Backups
Why it's wrong here
RDS Automated Backups are a data protection feature that captures continuous snapshots and transaction logs to an S3 bucket, enabling point-in-time recovery to any second within the retention period. However, backups are dormant storage artifacts — restoring them creates a new, separate DB instance via a restore process. They do not serve live read traffic, cannot be failed over to automatically, and offer no low-latency access for application queries. In short, they solve data durability and disaster recovery, not read performance or high availability.
- ✗
RDS Performance Insights
Why it's wrong here
RDS Performance Insights is a database monitoring and diagnostics service that gathers metrics such as DB load, wait events, and SQL query performance, presenting them on a visual dashboard. It helps you identify bottlenecks like a specific query consuming excessive resources. It plays no data-plane role: it neither creates copies of data nor changes how client connections are routed. Therefore, it cannot offload read traffic or provide any form of failover capability; it merely gives observability into database health.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.