SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company hosts a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. Recently, the application has become slow during peak hours. The operations team notices that the database CPU utilization is high, but the number of connections is within limits. The application is read-heavy. The team wants to improve performance with minimal changes to the application code. The database is currently a single Aurora instance. Which solution should the team implement?
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
✓
Add an Aurora Replica and configure the application to use the reader endpoint for read-only queries.
Adding an Aurora Replica distributes read traffic, reducing load on the primary instance. The application must be configured to use the reader endpoint for read queries.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Add an Aurora Replica and configure the application to use the reader endpoint for read-only queries.
Why this is correct
This offloads read traffic with minimal application changes.
- ✗
Use Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) to cache database queries.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not Aurora.
- ✗
Add an Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster in front of the database.
Why it's wrong here
Caching would require significant application changes.
- ✗
Increase the instance size of the Aurora primary instance.
Why it's wrong here
This may help but is less efficient than adding replicas for read-heavy workloads.
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Same concept, more angles
2 more ways this is tested on SAP-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. During a recent load test, the application became unresponsive for several minutes. The monitoring shows that the RDS instance CPU utilization spiked to 100% during the test. The application reads and writes to the same database. Which design change would provide the BEST improvement in database scalability and reduce CPU contention?
medium- ✓ A.Create RDS read replicas for the DB instance and route read queries from the application to the replicas.
- B.Configure an in-memory cache like Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequent queries.
- C.Increase the instance size of the RDS DB instance to a larger instance type.
- D.Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS instance to distribute the load across two instances.
Why A: Creating RDS read replicas offloads read queries from the primary DB instance, reducing CPU contention from read-heavy workloads. Since the application reads and writes to the same database, directing read traffic to replicas decreases the primary instance's CPU utilization, directly addressing the 100% CPU spike observed during the load test. This improves database scalability by distributing read operations horizontally without altering write capacity.
Variation 2. A company runs a web application on EC2 instances behind an ALB. The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL database. The operations team notices that the database CPU utilization is consistently above 80% during business hours. The team needs to reduce database load without changing the application code. Which TWO actions should the team take? (Select TWO.)
medium- ✓ A.Create an Aurora read replica and direct read queries to it.
- B.Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.
- ✓ C.Implement an ElastiCache for Redis caching layer to cache frequent queries.
- D.Enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights to identify slow queries.
- E.Increase the Auto Scaling group maximum size to handle more traffic.
Why A: Creating an Aurora read replica offloads read queries from the primary DB instance, reducing CPU load on it. Option C is correct because implementing an ElastiCache for Redis caching layer reduces the number of repeated read queries hitting the database, further lowering CPU utilization. Option B is wrong: while increasing the DB instance class could provide more CPU resources, it does not reduce load—it only scales up, which is not a best practice for immediate load reduction without code changes. Option D is wrong because Performance Insights is a monitoring tool for identifying performance bottlenecks, not a direct mechanism to reduce database load. Option E is wrong because increasing the Auto Scaling group size only scales the application tier, which would increase traffic to the database, worsening the CPU issue.
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-C02 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 SAP-C02 exam.