CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company runs a high-traffic e-commerce application. During peak holiday season, database read performance degrades. They want to offload read traffic from their RDS primary database. What should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Multi-AZ (which provides failover but not read scaling) with Read Replicas, assuming that a standby in another AZ can serve reads, but AWS explicitly prevents read traffic to the Multi-AZ standby to maintain consistency and failover integrity.
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
B is correct because RDS Read Replicas are specifically designed to offload read traffic from the primary database instance. By creating one or more read-only replicas, the application can direct SELECT queries to the replicas, reducing the load on the primary RDS instance and improving overall read performance during peak traffic.
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
Why it's wrong here
RDS Multi-AZ provides a synchronous standby replica in a different Availability Zone primarily for automatic failover and high availability. The standby does not accept connections or serve read traffic, so it cannot offload the read workload from the primary DB instance. Therefore, it does not address the application's need to reduce read load during peak times.
- ✓
RDS Read Replicas
Why this is correct
RDS Read Replicas are asynchronous read-only copies of the primary database that can serve SELECT queries, effectively offloading read traffic from the primary instance. This horizontal read scaling is ideal for read-heavy workloads, allowing the primary to focus on write operations. However, remember that replication lag may cause slightly stale reads, which is acceptable for many reporting and dashboard use cases.
- ✗
Increase the RDS instance size
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up to a larger RDS instance class provides more CPU and memory, which can give temporary relief by allowing the primary instance to process more concurrent queries. However, vertical scaling has hard upper limits, and the instance remains a single point of failure for all traffic. It does not provide separate read replicas or horizontally distribute read load, so it is not the optimal long-term solution for read-heavy demand.
- ✗
Enable RDS Automated Backups
Why it's wrong here
Automated backups in RDS create snapshots and transaction logs stored in S3, enabling point-in-time recovery and restoring to a new instance. These backups do not serve live query traffic and have no effect on the performance of the running primary database. Enabling backups is a durability and disaster-recovery measure, not a performance or read-scaling solution.
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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.