SAA-C03 RDS Read Replica Practice Question
Exhibit
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL metrics during the end-of-day report window: - CPUUtilization: 24% - ReadLatency: 118 ms - WriteLatency: 7 ms - DiskQueueDepth: 0.4 - FreeStorageSpace: stable Application notes: - Report queries are read-only and run for 20 to 30 minutes - The operational API continues to perform writes during the report window - Business accepts slightly stale report data if write performance stays unchanged
Based on the exhibit, what is the best change to improve read performance without increasing write latency on the primary database?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Multi-AZ with read scaling, assuming the standby instance can serve reads, when in fact Multi-AZ only provides failover redundancy and the standby is not accessible for read operations.
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 an RDS read replica and direct the reporting queries to the replica endpoint.
Creating an RDS read replica offloads read-heavy reporting queries from the primary database instance, improving read performance without adding any write latency to the primary. The replica operates asynchronously, so writes on the primary are not blocked or delayed by the replica's lag. This is the standard AWS solution for scaling read traffic on RDS.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create an RDS read replica and direct the reporting queries to the replica endpoint.
Why this is correct
A read replica offloads the long-running read-only reports from the primary database, which preserves write performance and reduces read latency for the reporting workload. Because the business accepts slightly stale report data, the asynchronous replication delay is acceptable. This is the most direct and AWS-native way to separate read pressure from writes.
- ✗
Convert the DB instance to Multi-AZ so the primary can serve more reads.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ improves availability and failover behavior, but it does not add read scaling capacity for reporting traffic.
- ✗
Increase the primary instance class to a larger size and keep all traffic on one writer.
Why it's wrong here
A larger instance might help temporarily, but it keeps read and write workloads competing on the same primary database.
- ✗
Migrate the reporting workload to DynamoDB to gain faster reads.
Why it's wrong here
That would require a data model redesign and service migration, which is unnecessary for the stated problem and not the simplest performance fix.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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.