SAP-C02 Practice Question: Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
A company is modernizing a legacy Java application to run on AWS. The application currently uses a monolithic architecture with a shared MySQL database. The company wants to adopt a microservices architecture using containers and wants to decouple the database. The solutions architect proposes using Amazon ECS with Fargate for compute and Amazon RDS for MySQL for the database. However, during the transition, the performance team notices that the database CPU utilization is consistently above 80% during peak hours. The application logs show many slow queries. The team suspects that the database is the bottleneck. The company wants to improve performance without rewriting the application. Which action should the solutions architect take first?
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
✓
Enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights to identify the most resource-intensive queries.
The first step to address the database bottleneck is to identify the root cause of the slow queries. Enabling Amazon RDS Performance Insights provides detailed visibility into query performance, allowing the team to pinpoint the most resource-intensive queries and their execution plans. This diagnostic information guides further optimization efforts (e.g., indexing, query rewriting, or schema changes) without requiring application code changes. Options B and C are premature without understanding which queries are problematic; a read replica would not help if the bottleneck is write-heavy or if reads are already well-distributed, and scaling up may only mask the issue. Option D would require significant application rewriting, which contradicts the requirement to improve performance without rewriting 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.
- ✓
Enable Amazon RDS Performance Insights to identify the most resource-intensive queries.
Why this is correct
First step: diagnose the problem.
- ✗
Add an RDS read replica and direct read traffic to it.
Why it's wrong here
Helps if read-heavy, but may not address slow queries.
- ✗
Scale up the RDS instance to a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
May be necessary but not first step; need to analyze first.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB to eliminate relational bottlenecks.
Why it's wrong here
Requires application rewrite, not minimal change.
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