SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical application on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The database performance has degraded over time. The Solutions Architect notices that read queries are slow and the DB instance's ReadIOPS metric is consistently high. Which action would improve read performance with minimal operational overhead?
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
✓
Create an RDS read replica and redirect read queries to it.
Creating an RDS read replica (Option D) offloads read traffic from the primary instance, reducing ReadIOPS and improving read query performance. This requires minimal operational overhead because Amazon RDS manages the replica. Option A is incorrect: increasing storage can help with IOPS limits but does not directly reduce read load. Option B is incorrect: Multi-AZ provides high availability, not read scalability. Option C is incorrect: migrating to Aurora involves more effort and is not the simplest solution.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the allocated storage of the DB instance.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing allocated storage can increase IOPS limits but does not directly offload read traffic, so it will not effectively reduce high ReadIOPS.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ deployment for the DB instance.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ deployment provides a standby instance for failover, but it is not used for read scaling; it does not reduce read load on the primary.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to Amazon Aurora might improve performance but requires significant operational effort (migration, testing, potential app changes), which is not minimal overhead.
- ✓
Create an RDS read replica and redirect read queries to it.
Why this is correct
Creating an RDS read replica distributes read queries to a separate instance, directly reducing ReadIOPS on the primary and improving read performance with minimal overhead.
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