DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A company is designing a multi-tenant SaaS application on Amazon Aurora MySQL. Each tenant has its own database, but some tenants are very large and generate high write traffic. The company wants to isolate tenant workloads to prevent a noisy neighbor from affecting other tenants. Which TWO design strategies should the database specialist recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse connection pooling (RDS Proxy) with resource isolation, not realizing that RDS Proxy only manages connections and does not prevent a noisy neighbor from exhausting the cluster's shared I/O or CPU capacity.
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
✓
Use Aurora Serverless for tenants with variable workloads
Aurora Serverless automatically scales compute capacity based on application demand, which is ideal for tenants with variable workloads. This prevents a noisy neighbor scenario by ensuring that a tenant's burst of write traffic does not consume shared resources that would degrade performance for other tenants.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use Aurora Serverless for tenants with variable workloads
Why this is correct
Aurora Serverless automatically scales compute capacity based on workload, minimizing impact on other tenants.
- ✗
Use a single Aurora cluster with read replicas for each tenant
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas only offload read traffic; write traffic still hits the primary instance, causing contention.
- ✗
Migrate all tenants to Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for caching
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is a different database model and may not fit relational workloads.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to pool connections and limit throughput per tenant
Why it's wrong here
RDS Proxy manages connections but does not provide workload isolation.
- ✓
Use separate Aurora clusters for high-traffic tenants
Why this is correct
Separate clusters provide complete resource isolation, preventing noisy neighbor issues.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DBS-C01 question from scratch — 1,663 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.