SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company runs a web application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon RDS MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. During a recent load test, the application became unresponsive for several minutes. The monitoring shows that the RDS instance CPU utilization spiked to 100% during the test. The application reads and writes to the same database. Which design change would provide the BEST improvement in database scalability and reduce CPU contention?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse Multi-AZ with read replicas, thinking Multi-AZ distributes read traffic, when in fact Multi-AZ only provides a standby replica for failover and does not serve read requests.
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 RDS read replicas for the DB instance and route read queries from the application to the replicas.
Creating RDS read replicas offloads read queries from the primary DB instance, reducing CPU contention from read-heavy workloads. Since the application reads and writes to the same database, directing read traffic to replicas decreases the primary instance's CPU utilization, directly addressing the 100% CPU spike observed during the load test. This improves database scalability by distributing read operations horizontally without altering write capacity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Create RDS read replicas for the DB instance and route read queries from the application to the replicas.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic, reducing CPU on the primary.
- ✗
Configure an in-memory cache like Amazon ElastiCache to cache frequent queries.
Why it's wrong here
Caching reduces read load but not writes; still CPU contention may remain.
- ✗
Increase the instance size of the RDS DB instance to a larger instance type.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling may help temporarily but is not as efficient as offloading reads.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ for the RDS instance to distribute the load across two instances.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ is for high availability, not read scaling.
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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.