DEA-C01 Data Store Management Practice Question
A company is using Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The database experiences intermittent slowdowns during peak hours. The company's DevOps team suspects that the primary instance is overwhelmed. Which action should the team take to distribute the read load without changing the application code?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Multi-AZ with read replicas, assuming Multi-AZ can distribute read traffic, but in RDS for MySQL, the standby in a Multi-AZ deployment is not accessible for reads—it only provides failover support.
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
✓
Create a read replica and modify the connection string to point to the replica for read queries.
Creating a read replica and modifying the connection string to point to the replica for read queries (Option B) offloads read traffic from the primary RDS instance without requiring application code changes. This directly addresses the intermittent slowdowns during peak hours by distributing the read load, leveraging MySQL’s native replication to keep the replica synchronized. The key constraint is 'without changing the application code,' which is satisfied by simply updating the connection string in the application configuration.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the instance size of the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing size helps performance but does not distribute read load; it vertically scales the single instance.
- ✓
Create a read replica and modify the connection string to point to the replica for read queries.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic from the primary instance.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ on the existing instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides failover support, not read scaling.
- ✗
Configure DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not RDS MySQL.
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