SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a critical e-commerce platform on AWS. The application is deployed across multiple Availability Zones in a single region (us-east-1). The architecture includes an Application Load Balancer (ALB), an EC2 Auto Scaling group, and an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ database. The application experiences periodic spikes in traffic, and the Auto Scaling group scales out successfully. However, during a recent traffic spike, the database CPU utilization reached 90%, causing increased latency and some database connection timeouts. The company needs to improve the database performance to handle the spikes without over-provisioning. The solutions architect must design a solution that reduces the load on the primary database instance and improves read scalability. The application is read-heavy, with a read-to-write ratio of 80:20. Which solution should the architect implement?
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 one or more Amazon RDS Read Replicas in the same region and configure the application to route read queries to the read replica endpoint.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas can offload read traffic from the primary instance, reducing CPU utilization. For a read-heavy workload (80:20), creating Read Replicas in the same region and routing read queries to them is the most effective solution to improve read scalability without over-provisioning the primary. Option D is correct. Option A (ElastiCache) is more suited for caching but does not offload database reads directly; it requires significant application changes and may not handle all query patterns. Option B (scaling up instance class) has scaling limits and is less cost-effective; Multi-AZ is for high availability, not read scaling. Option C (DynamoDB) is a different database; migrating would be complex and unnecessary.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster to cache frequent database queries.
Why it's wrong here
Caching reduces load but requires application changes and may not be suitable for all read queries.
- ✗
Increase the DB instance class to a larger size and enable Multi-AZ with synchronous replication.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up helps but is not as scalable as read replicas; Multi-AZ does not improve read performance.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for read performance.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to DynamoDB is a major change; DAX is for DynamoDB, not MySQL.
- ✓
Create one or more Amazon RDS Read Replicas in the same region and configure the application to route read queries to the read replica endpoint.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic from the primary, improving performance for read-heavy workloads.
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