SAA-C03 Design Resilient Architectures Practice Question
A database administrator needs to ensure that an Amazon RDS for MySQL instance can withstand an Availability Zone failure and provide low-latency reads for a reporting application. Which TWO steps should be taken?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often forget that a Multi-AZ standby is not accessible for reads. To offload read traffic, a separate Read Replica is mandatory, as the standby instance is strictly for failover.
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 Multi-AZ deployment for the RDS instance.
Enabling Multi-AZ provides the high availability needed to survive an AZ failure by maintaining a synchronous standby. Creating a Read Replica in a different AZ offloads read traffic from the primary instance, improving performance for the reporting application while also providing an additional layer of data redundancy across the region.
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 this is correct
Multi-AZ deployment is the standard feature for high availability in Amazon RDS. It creates a standby instance in a different Availability Zone and uses synchronous replication. In the event of a failure, RDS automatically fails over to the standby, ensuring the database remains available without manual intervention or data loss during the transition.
- ✓
Create a Read Replica in a different Availability Zone.
Why this is correct
Read Replicas allow you to scale out read-heavy workloads by providing an asynchronous copy of the primary database. By placing a Read Replica in a different AZ, you provide the reporting application with a dedicated endpoint for queries, reducing the load on the primary instance and improving overall application performance and latency.
- ✗
Use EBS Snapshots to back up the database every 5 minutes.
Why it's wrong here
While snapshots are important for disaster recovery, they do not provide high availability or low-latency reads. Restoring from a snapshot is a manual process that takes time, and taking snapshots every 5 minutes would create significant performance overhead on the database. It is not a replacement for the automated failover provided by Multi-AZ.
- ✗
Enable Enhanced Monitoring with a 1-second granularity.
Why it's wrong here
Enhanced Monitoring provides detailed metrics about the OS and processes running on the RDS instance. While helpful for troubleshooting performance issues, it does not contribute to the resilience of the database or provide any mechanisms for surviving an Availability Zone failure. It is a monitoring tool rather than an architectural availability feature.
- ✗
Implement a Network Load Balancer in front of the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Network Load Balancers are used to distribute traffic to EC2 instances or IP addresses, but they are not typically used in front of Amazon RDS. RDS handles its own DNS-based failover for Multi-AZ. Adding an NLB would introduce unnecessary complexity and is not a standard or recommended practice for managing RDS database connections.
About these practice questions
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JA
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.