DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A company runs an e-commerce application on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The application experiences read-heavy traffic during flash sales. The development team wants to offload read traffic without changing the application code. Which solution should be used?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Multi-AZ with read scaling, assuming the standby instance can serve reads, but in RDS Multi-AZ the standby is not accessible for read traffic—it only provides failover redundancy.
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 RDS Read Replica and point read traffic to the replica endpoint.
Creating an RDS Read Replica allows read-heavy traffic to be offloaded from the primary RDS instance without any application code changes. The application simply needs to be configured to use the read replica's endpoint for SELECT queries, while writes continue to the primary instance. This directly addresses the requirement to offload read traffic without modifying the application code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache cluster and update the application to cache queries.
Why it's wrong here
Requires application code changes.
- ✗
Configure Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides failover, not read scaling.
- ✓
Create an RDS Read Replica and point read traffic to the replica endpoint.
Why this is correct
Read Replicas offload read traffic without application changes.
- ✗
Use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not RDS.
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