DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
A company is running a production Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. The database experiences intermittent high latency and the CloudWatch 'ReadLatency' metric spikes during periods of heavy read traffic. The application uses a single database endpoint. What is the MOST effective way to reduce read latency without changing the application code?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse 'Multi-AZ' with 'readable standby' — classic Multi-AZ provides high availability but no read scaling, while the newer Multi-AZ DB cluster (or adding Read Replicas) is required to reduce read latency.
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
✓
Enable a Multi-AZ deployment with one or more readable standby replicas.
Enabling a Multi-AZ deployment with one or more readable standby replicas allows you to offload read traffic to the standby instances using the Read Replica endpoint, reducing load on the primary and lowering ReadLatency. Since the application uses a single database endpoint, you can use Amazon RDS's built-in reader endpoint (for a Multi-AZ DB cluster) or configure a custom DNS to distribute reads, without modifying application code. This directly addresses the intermittent high latency during heavy read traffic by scaling read capacity horizontally.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Enable a Multi-AZ deployment with one or more readable standby replicas.
Why this is correct
Readable standby replicas in Multi-AZ allow read traffic to be directed to the standby, reducing load on the primary and lowering read latency, without code changes.
- ✗
Implement database sharding across multiple RDS instances.
Why it's wrong here
Sharding requires application-level changes to distribute data and queries, which does not meet the requirement of no code changes.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ on the existing DB instance to provide a standby for failover.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides high availability but does not offload read traffic; the standby is not used for reads.
- ✗
Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up the instance may improve performance but is not the most targeted solution for read-heavy workloads and may be overprovisioned for writes.
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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.