DBS-C01 Management and Operations Practice Question
A company runs a critical e-commerce application on Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ enabled. The database is 2 TB and uses General Purpose (gp2) storage. Recently, during peak hours, the application experienced a 5-minute outage. The CloudWatch logs show that the primary DB instance failed and an automatic failover occurred. However, the failover took 3 minutes, which is longer than the expected 1-2 minutes. The 'ReadLatency' and 'WriteLatency' metrics were elevated before the failure. The 'BurstBalance' metric was at 0% for the hour before the failure. The team suspects the issue is related to storage performance. What should the team do to prevent this issue in the future?
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
✓
Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS (io1).
The BurstBalance at 0% indicates the gp2 volume exhausted its burst credits, causing I/O throttling and increased latency, which likely contributed to the failover delay. Switching to Provisioned IOPS (io1) provides consistent performance and avoids burst credit exhaustion. Option A is wrong because increasing the DB instance class addresses compute capacity, not storage I/O. Option C is wrong because backup retention period does not affect storage performance. Option D is wrong because read replicas offload read traffic but do not improve write performance on the primary instance.
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.
Why it's wrong here
Instance class affects CPU and memory, but the issue is storage IOPS exhaustion.
- ✓
Change the storage type to Provisioned IOPS (io1).
Why this is correct
Provisioned IOPS provides consistent I/O performance and avoids burst credit exhaustion.
- ✗
Increase the backup retention period to 35 days.
Why it's wrong here
Backup retention does not affect storage performance.
- ✗
Create a read replica to offload read traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas do not improve write performance on the primary.
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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.