DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A company has a critical application that uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. During a recent failure, the automatic failover took 2 minutes, causing application timeout. The company needs to reduce failover time to under 30 seconds. Which solution should the database specialist recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often think increasing instance size or using RDS Proxy directly reduces failover time, but failover time is dominated by crash recovery and log replay, not compute or connection management.
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
✓
Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora MySQL.
Amazon Aurora MySQL is designed to reduce failover time significantly compared to standard RDS MySQL Multi-AZ. Aurora typically completes failover in under 30 seconds by using a shared distributed storage volume across multiple Availability Zones, allowing the primary instance to fail over to a read replica without the need to replay redo logs or perform crash recovery. This meets the requirement of reducing failover time to under 30 seconds.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora MySQL.
Why this is correct
Aurora has a distributed storage layer that allows faster failover.
- ✗
Create a read replica and promote it during failover.
Why it's wrong here
Manual promotion takes time and does not provide automatic failover.
- ✗
Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.
Why it's wrong here
Instance size does not affect failover time.
- ✗
Implement Amazon RDS Proxy to handle connection draining.
Why it's wrong here
RDS Proxy reduces connection disruption but does not speed up failover.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DBS-C01 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 DBS-C01 exam.