SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A financial services company runs a critical trading application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in three Availability Zones. The application uses a MySQL-compatible Amazon RDS for MariaDB database with Multi-AZ deployment. Recently, the operations team noticed that during periods of heavy trading, the database CPU utilization spikes to 100%, causing query timeouts and application errors. The team has already reviewed slow query logs and enabled Performance Insights, but the issue persists. The application is read-heavy with frequent writes. The team needs to reduce database load with minimal changes to the application code. Which solution is the MOST effective and scalable?
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 read replicas of the RDS for MariaDB instance and configure the application to send read queries to the read replicas.
(RDS for MariaDB read replicas with read-only database connections) offloads read traffic without code changes, as read replicas can be used by modifying the connection string. Option A (Aurora) would require migration. Option B (ElastiCache) requires application code to cache data. Option C (DynamoDB Accelerator) is for DynamoDB, not MariaDB.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Migrate the database to Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition with Auto Scaling and enable performance insights.
Why it's wrong here
Migrating to Aurora is a significant change and may not be considered minimal.
- ✗
Implement an in-memory caching layer using Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached and modify the application to check the cache first.
Why it's wrong here
Requires application code modifications.
- ✗
Replace the RDS database with Amazon DynamoDB and use DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) for caching.
Why it's wrong here
Complete database change is not minimal and requires major code changes.
- ✓
Create read replicas of the RDS for MariaDB instance and configure the application to send read queries to the read replicas.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read traffic with minimal application changes (connection string).
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