SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is running a production web application on AWS using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application uses a MySQL database hosted on Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ enabled. Recently, during a traffic spike, some users experienced increased latency and occasional 503 errors. The operations team noticed that the database CPU utilization reached 100% and the number of database connections peaked at the maximum limit. The application team confirmed that the application uses connection pooling on the EC2 instances but the pool size is fixed. Which solution should the solutions architect recommend to prevent recurrence?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse connection exhaustion with CPU or memory bottlenecks and choose vertical scaling (Option B) or read replicas (Option A), missing that the core issue is the fixed connection pool size and the database's max connections limit, which RDS Proxy directly addresses by pooling and reusing connections.
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 Amazon RDS Proxy to manage database connections.
The issue stems from database connections hitting the maximum limit, causing CPU saturation and 503 errors. Amazon RDS Proxy sits between the application and the database, efficiently managing and pooling connections from the EC2 instances, reducing the number of open connections to the RDS instance and preventing connection exhaustion. This allows the existing connection pooling on the EC2 side to scale without overwhelming the database, directly addressing the root cause.
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 read replicas to offload read queries.
Why it's wrong here
Read replicas do not help if the issue is connection exhaustion or write-heavy workload.
- ✗
Increase the DB instance class to a larger size.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling may not be cost-effective and still has connection limits.
- ✓
Implement Amazon RDS Proxy to manage database connections.
Why this is correct
RDS Proxy pools connections, reducing the load on the database and preventing connection exhaustion.
- ✗
Increase the maximum number of EC2 instances in the Auto Scaling group.
Why it's wrong here
More EC2 instances will increase database connections, worsening the problem.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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