DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions Practice Question
An e-commerce platform uses Amazon DynamoDB as its primary database. The platform experiences occasional read throttling during flash sales. The operations team needs to ensure that read traffic is handled without errors, while keeping costs low. What should a DevOps engineer recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap is thinking that increasing RCUs or using Global Tables is the best fix for read throttling, when the question emphasizes cost and handling read traffic without errors; DAX is the purpose-built caching 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
✓
Enable DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache frequently read data.
DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is an in-memory cache for DynamoDB that reduces read load on the table by serving repeated read requests from cache. During flash sales, read traffic spikes on popular items; DAX absorbs these reads, preventing throttling and improving latency, while keeping costs low because it reduces the need to over-provision read capacity. This is the most cost-effective solution for read-heavy, repetitive access patterns.
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 DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache frequently read data.
Why this is correct
DAX is a fully managed, in-memory caching service placed in front of DynamoDB, returning cached items with microsecond latency. By writing through and caching the frequently read flash-sale items, it absorbs the burst of read traffic before it reaches the table, which directly reduces consumed read capacity units and throttling events. This requires no costly rearchitecture or constantly adjusting provisioned throughput, making it the most appropriate solution for unpredictable read spikes.
- ✗
Increase the read capacity units for the table during flash sale events.
Why it's wrong here
Raising the table's read capacity units for the flash sale is a short-term, cost-heavy measure that only addresses the symptom of throttling rather than the cause of bursty read load. You would need to provision for the absolute peak demand, which means paying continuously for far more capacity than the baseline requires, and any unexpected traffic above that still gets throttled. It also does not reduce the amount of work DynamoDB must perform per read, nor does it mitigate hot partitions that might limit a single partition's throughput.
- ✗
Use DynamoDB Streams to replicate reads to a separate table.
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB Streams captures a time-ordered sequence of item-level changes (creates, updates, deletes) for change data capture, and is meant for event-driven workflows like fanning out to Lambda or replicating to another data store. Reading from a separate table created via streams requires changing your application to point all read traffic to that replica, and the replica consumption still counts against the source or replica's capacity—it does not offload the existing table's read load. Streaming item changes does nothing to address the immediate read burst against the primary table or provide low-latency caching.
- ✗
Implement Global Tables to distribute read traffic across multiple regions.
Why it's wrong here
Global Tables automatically replicate data across multiple AWS Regions for low-latency writes and disaster recovery scenarios, not for alleviating read throttling from a single-Region flash sale. Even with multi-region reads, the total provisioned read capacity in the source Region remains unchanged unless you explicitly add more, and the added complexity and replication lag make it an overkill approach. The root issue is the burst of read traffic on one table in one region, which DAX solves directly, whereas Global Tables would only help if traffic were intentionally distributed across geographic locations.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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