An e-commerce application uses Aurora MySQL. Writes are modest, but the product-detail page generates many read-only queries and the writer instance CPU is high. The application can tolerate a small amount of replication lag on those reads. What should the team do?

Increase the writer instance size and keep all traffic on the primary.

A larger writer may temporarily relieve CPU pressure, but it does not solve the architectural issue of read traffic competing with writes. The application would still send every query to the primary instance, limiting future scalability. Since the reads can tolerate a bit of lag, offloading them to replicas is a better design.

Replace Aurora with DynamoDB to eliminate replication lag.

Switching database engines would require major application redesign and is not the simplest answer to a read-scaling problem in Aurora. DynamoDB has different query patterns, data modeling rules, and consistency behavior. The question asks how to improve the current Aurora architecture, so a full migration is unnecessary and too disruptive.

Enable Multi-AZ failover only, because it increases read throughput automatically.

Multi-AZ improves availability and failover behavior, but it is not a read-scaling feature. It ensures that the database can recover quickly if the primary fails, yet it does not automatically redirect large volumes of read traffic away from the writer for performance purposes. The problem here is read load, not just availability.

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 read replicas and send read-only traffic to the reader endpoint. — Aurora read replicas and the reader endpoint are the best fit because the workload is read-heavy and the application can tolerate a small amount of lag. This allows the team to keep writes on the primary while sending product-detail reads to replicas, reducing writer CPU and improving overall throughput. It is a standard, low-risk scaling pattern for Aurora when read performance is the main bottleneck. Why others are wrong: Increasing the writer size only postpones the bottleneck and keeps read pressure on the primary. Migrating to another database is too disruptive for a problem that can be solved within Aurora. Multi-AZ is about availability and failover, not read scaling. Because the scenario explicitly allows slight lag, read replicas are the most appropriate solution.

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.