SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company has a mission-critical application running on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database experiences high read traffic that causes performance degradation. The company wants to improve read scalability without modifying the application. Which THREE solutions should a solutions architect recommend?
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
✓
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache cluster to cache frequently accessed data.
Options A, C, and E are correct. Amazon ElastiCache reduces database load by caching frequently accessed data. Read replicas offload read traffic from the primary database. RDS Proxy helps manage database connections and reduce load on the database. Option B (Multi-AZ) provides high availability and automatic failover but does not improve read scalability. Option D (database sharding) requires application modifications and is not the recommended approach for read scalability without modifying the application.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache cluster to cache frequently accessed data.
Why this is correct
Caching reduces database read load, and the application can be modified to read from cache without major changes if using a caching layer.
- ✗
Deploy a Multi-AZ RDS instance for automatic failover.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides high availability, not read scaling.
- ✓
Create one or more read replicas of the RDS instance and configure the application to use the reader endpoint.
Why this is correct
Read replicas handle read queries, reducing load on the primary.
- ✗
Implement database sharding by splitting the data across multiple RDS instances.
Why it's wrong here
Sharding requires application changes and is not a simple solution.
- ✓
Use Amazon RDS Proxy to manage database connections and reduce load.
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy reduces connection overhead and can improve performance, but it does not directly scale reads; however, it helps overall database efficiency.
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