DBS-C01 Workload-Specific Database Design Practice Question
A retail company runs its inventory management system on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The application performs frequent updates to inventory counts. The operations team notices that write latency increases significantly during peak sales hours. The database is a single db.r5.large instance with General Purpose SSD (gp2) storage. The CPU utilization is around 40% during peaks, but the write latency spikes. The team suspects a storage bottleneck. Which change would most effectively reduce write 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
✓
Change storage type to Provisioned IOPS (io2) with sufficient IOPS.
Provisioned IOPS (io2) storage provides consistent low-latency I/O performance compared to gp2, which can have variable performance due to burst credits. Option A (Multi-AZ) improves availability, not latency. Option C (read replica) offloads reads, not writes. Option D (scale up instance) increases compute capacity but may not address the I/O bottleneck if the issue is storage performance.
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 Multi-AZ deployment.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ does not reduce write latency.
- ✓
Change storage type to Provisioned IOPS (io2) with sufficient IOPS.
Why this is correct
Provisioned IOPS provides consistent low-latency write performance.
- ✗
Add a read replica to offload read traffic.
Why it's wrong here
Write traffic is the issue.
- ✗
Scale up to a db.r5.xlarge instance.
Why it's wrong here
CPU is not the bottleneck.
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