DBS-C01 Amazon Aurora Global Database Practice Question
A company runs a global application using Amazon Aurora Global Database. The primary region is us-east-1, and secondary regions are eu-west-1 and ap-southeast-1. The application reports that writes to the primary are taking longer than expected. What is the most likely cause?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume that Global Database replication causes synchronous overhead on the primary, but Aurora Global Database uses asynchronous replication, which does not add commit latency. The real performance bottleneck is typically the primary instance's 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
✓
The primary DB instance is under-provisioned.
Amazon Aurora Global Database uses asynchronous replication from the primary region to secondary regions. Writes to the primary are committed locally and do not wait for replication to complete. Therefore, replication to secondary regions does not introduce synchronous commit latencies. The most likely cause of slower writes to the primary is an under-provisioned primary DB instance that cannot handle the write workload efficiently.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Multi-AZ failover occurred in the primary region.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ failover in the primary region would temporarily affect write availability but is unlikely to be the cause of consistently longer write times.
- ✗
The Global Database replication to secondary regions is causing synchronous commit latencies.
Why it's wrong here
Aurora Global Database uses asynchronous replication, so synchronous commit latencies are not introduced. Replication does not directly impact primary write latency.
- ✓
The primary DB instance is under-provisioned.
Why this is correct
An under-provisioned primary DB instance can lead to longer write times due to insufficient CPU, memory, or I/O capacity to handle the write workload.
- ✗
Read replicas in secondary regions are overloaded.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas in secondary regions handle read traffic only and do not affect write performance on the primary.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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