DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response Practice Question
A company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL with Multi-AZ deployment. The application experiences increased latency during peak hours. The DevOps engineer investigates and notices that the Read Replicas are not being utilized effectively. The application is configured to use the primary database endpoint. The engineer wants to offload read traffic to the Read Replicas without changing the application code. What is the BEST solution?
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
✓
Configure Amazon RDS Proxy in front of the database and enable read/write splitting.
Amazon RDS Proxy with read/write splitting allows the application to offload read traffic to Read Replicas without code changes. It automatically directs read queries to Read Replicas and write queries to the primary, using a single endpoint. Option A (increasing instance size) does not leverage Read Replicas. Option B (modifying application) requires code changes. Option C (Multi-AZ cluster with read-only endpoint) is invalid because Multi-AZ clusters use a writer and reader endpoint, but the question requires no code changes, and the existing configuration uses a primary endpoint; also, creating a new cluster may not be the simplest solution compared to RDS Proxy.
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 instance size of the primary database to handle the load.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up the primary RDS instance size only increases the compute and memory capacity of the single writer node. It does not offload read traffic because all read requests still hit the same primary instance, and the Multi-AZ standby is not used for reads. This approach addresses raw capacity limits but does not distribute the read workload, so the primary can remain the bottleneck and the cost scales linearly without any architectural benefit.
- ✗
Modify the application to use separate endpoints for read and write operations.
Why it's wrong here
Modifying the application to use separate endpoints for read and write operations would require code changes and manual management of read replicas. Even then, you would have to provision and maintain replica instances, handle replica lag, and implement custom load balancing. RDS Proxy is specifically designed to avoid this complexity by automatically routing statements to the correct endpoint based on query type, so a manual split is an unnecessary development effort that does not leverage managed AWS capabilities.
- ✗
Create a new Multi-AZ cluster with a read-only endpoint.
Why it's wrong here
A Multi-AZ DB instance in RDS for MySQL provides an automatic failover standby that is not accessible for read traffic, and it does not have a read-only endpoint. Creating another Multi-AZ deployment with a read-only endpoint is not possible for classic Multi-AZ because the standby is a synchronous replica used only for durability and failover. Even if you created a Multi-AZ DB cluster, you would still need to redirect read queries appropriately, whereas RDS Proxy provides built-in read/write splitting without such infrastructure changes.
- ✓
Configure Amazon RDS Proxy in front of the database and enable read/write splitting.
Why this is correct
Amazon RDS Proxy sits between the application and the database, pooling and reusing connections to reduce connection overhead, and when read/write splitting is enabled it can automatically route read queries to one or more Read Replicas while sending write transactions to the primary. This transparently offloads read traffic from the primary without requiring application code changes or manual endpoint management. The proxy also maintains session state and preserves transaction semantics, making it the correct solution for reducing load on a Multi-AZ RDS MySQL instance.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-C02 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 DOP-C02 exam.