DBS-C01 Monitoring and Troubleshooting Practice Question
A company runs a critical e-commerce application on Amazon Aurora MySQL with a single DB instance. The database has 8 TB of data and uses the default writer endpoint. Recently, the application experienced a 10-minute outage during a primary instance failover. The failover was triggered by an underlying hardware issue. The database specialist needs to minimize downtime during future failovers. The application team is unwilling to modify the application code to handle connection retries. The company has a 99.99% SLA requirement. Which solution should the database specialist implement to meet the SLA with minimal application changes?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to assume Multi-AZ (Option B) is sufficient for zero-downtime failover, but they overlook that the application must handle connection retries, which the question explicitly prohibits, making RDS Proxy the only solution that provides transparent failover without code changes.
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 an Amazon RDS Proxy and configure the application to connect to the proxy endpoint
Amazon RDS Proxy sits between the application and the database, pooling and reusing database connections. During a failover, RDS Proxy maintains the client connections and transparently reconnects to the new primary instance, so the application does not experience a connection loss and does not need to implement retry logic. This directly addresses the 10-minute outage by reducing failover downtime to seconds, meeting the 99.99% SLA without application code changes.
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 DB instance class to a larger size to improve performance and reduce failover time
Why it's wrong here
Instance size does not affect failover detection or recovery time.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment with automatic failover
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is already enabled; the issue is that the application does not retry connections, so failover still causes downtime.
- ✓
Create an Amazon RDS Proxy and configure the application to connect to the proxy endpoint
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy handles failover seamlessly by preserving connections and reducing downtime.
- ✗
Create a cross-Region read replica and promote it to primary during failover
Why it's wrong here
Promoting a read replica requires DNS changes and application reconnection, causing downtime.
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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.