An Aurora PostgreSQL application has an OLTP writer and a reporting dashboard that issues many read-only queries. The writer is healthy, but read latency rises noticeably during reporting windows. Which two changes should you make? Select two.

Scale up only the writer instance and keep all queries on it.

A larger writer may help briefly, but it does not address the core issue of separating read-heavy traffic from writes.

Replace the cluster with a single-AZ RDS instance to reduce replication overhead.

A single instance removes read scaling options and usually makes availability and read performance worse, not better.

Move the dashboard to DynamoDB without changing the query model.

This is not a direct fix for an Aurora read bottleneck and would require a major application redesign.

What does this SAA-C03 question test?

Static NAT maps one inside address to one outside address.

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Add Aurora Replicas to scale out the read workload. — Aurora Replicas are designed for read scaling, so they absorb reporting traffic that would otherwise compete with the writer. Using the reader endpoint directs read-only requests to those replicas automatically, which is the simplest way to separate read load from writes. This combination improves performance without changing the transactional write path or introducing unnecessary architectural complexity. Why others are wrong: Scaling only the writer does not separate reads from writes, so the reporting workload still competes with OLTP traffic. A single-AZ RDS instance removes the very feature that helps here: read scaling. Moving the dashboard to DynamoDB is a redesign, not a targeted performance fix for the Aurora bottleneck.

What should I do if I get this SAA-C03 question wrong?

Then try more questions from the same exam bank and focus on understanding why the wrong options are tempting.