SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company is running a web application on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an ALB. The application uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL database. Recently, the application has become slow, and the operations team identifies that the database is the bottleneck due to a high number of read queries. Which TWO actions should a solutions architect take to improve read performance? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse Multi-AZ with read replicas, assuming the standby instance can serve reads, when in fact Multi-AZ only provides failover and the standby is not accessible for read operations.
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 Amazon RDS Read Replica in the same AWS Region.
Adding an Amazon RDS Read Replica offloads read traffic from the primary MySQL database, allowing read queries to be served by the replica and reducing load on the source instance. This directly addresses the high number of read queries causing the bottleneck, as read replicas are designed for read-heavy workloads and can be promoted to a standalone instance if needed.
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 Multi-AZ for the RDS instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ provides failover, not read scaling.
- ✗
Implement DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) in front of the database.
Why it's wrong here
DAX is for DynamoDB, not RDS for MySQL.
- ✗
Scale up the RDS instance to a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up helps but does not fully address read-heavy workload.
- ✓
Add an Amazon RDS Read Replica in the same AWS Region.
Why this is correct
Read Replicas can handle read queries, reducing load on the primary.
- ✓
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster to cache frequent queries.
Why this is correct
Caching reduces database read load.
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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.