SAA-C03 Design High-Performing Architectures Practice Question
A company is migrating a high-performance database to Amazon RDS for MySQL. The workload involves intensive read operations, causing significant latency during peak traffic. Which solution provides the most effective performance improvement with minimal architectural changes?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates frequently select Multi-AZ deployments for read-heavy workloads, confusing high availability with horizontal read scaling. Multi-AZ is for failover, whereas Read Replicas are for offloading read traffic.
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 one or more RDS Read Replicas.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas are designed specifically for read-heavy workloads. By offloading SELECT queries to one or more replicas, the primary instance can focus solely on write operations. This architecture improves throughput and reduces latency without requiring application-level logic changes beyond updating the database connection string. This approach is standard for scaling RDS instances horizontally to meet fluctuating demand while maintaining data consistency.
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 for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is a high-availability configuration designed for failover, not performance scaling. While it ensures redundancy, it does not provide additional read capacity because the standby instance does not accept traffic until a failover event occurs, leaving read latency issues unaddressed during peak load times.
- ✗
Upgrade the RDS instance to a larger instance class.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling increases CPU and RAM, which might temporarily alleviate bottlenecks. However, it is an expensive and limited approach compared to horizontal scaling. Read replicas provide a more cost-effective, elastic, and scalable solution for read-intensive workloads that can grow as traffic demands increase over time.
- ✓
Create one or more RDS Read Replicas.
Why this is correct
Read replicas allow you to distribute read traffic across multiple instances. By offloading read operations from the primary database, you significantly improve performance and application responsiveness. This is the recommended AWS best practice for scaling read-heavy RDS workloads while maintaining the primary instance for critical write operations.
- ✗
Move the database to Amazon DynamoDB.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to a NoSQL database like DynamoDB requires a complete application rewrite and schema redesign. This is an excessive architectural change for a performance issue that can be solved by simple read scaling within the existing relational database environment, resulting in unnecessary development costs and risk.
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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
This SAA-C03 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 SAA-C03 exam.