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
Performance Insights captures database load segmented by SQL statement, wait event and host, exposing which queries consume the most CPU during peaks. This identifies the bottleneck without rewriting the application, satisfying the constraint of improving performance while the monolith remains unchanged.
- ✗
Add an RDS read replica and direct read traffic to it.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas offload SELECT queries only; the stem's slow queries and high CPU may stem from writes or poorly indexed reads, and replication adds no write capacity. It is tempting because read replicas genuinely scale read-heavy workloads, which would be the right fix if profiling showed read dominance.
- ✗
Scale up the RDS instance to a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up adds CPU and memory to the same instance, but slow queries caused by missing indexes or inefficient SQL still consume those resources, so the bottleneck persists. It tempts because vertical scaling is the fastest fix for genuine capacity exhaustion, and would be correct if monitoring showed CPU saturation without query-level inefficiency.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB to eliminate relational bottlenecks.
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is a non-relational key-value store, so migrating would require rewriting the Java application's SQL queries and schema, contradicting the no-rewrite requirement. DynamoDB suits greenfield applications designed for single-table access patterns, not a lift-and-shift of an existing MySQL workload.
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