SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A financial services company uses Amazon RDS for MySQL as the backend for a trading application. The application runs on EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an ALB. The database is a Multi-AZ DB instance with 500 GB provisioned storage. During peak trading hours, the application becomes slow. The RDS metrics show high CPU utilization and high read IOPS. The application performs many read-heavy queries. The team needs to improve performance without application changes. What should they do?
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 read replicas and direct read traffic to them.
Creating read replicas offloads read traffic from the primary DB instance, reducing CPU utilization and read IOPS during peak hours. This improves performance without requiring application changes. Option B (larger instance type) may help but could involve downtime and does not address the read-heavy nature as effectively. Option C (Performance Insights) provides monitoring but does not directly improve performance. Option D (Multi-AZ cluster with readable standbys) is for high availability and read scaling, but the two readable standbys may not be as cost-effective as dedicated read replicas, and converting to a cluster may require application changes or downtime.
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 one or more read replicas and direct read traffic to them.
Why this is correct
Read replicas offload read queries, reducing load on the primary instance.
- ✗
Modify the DB instance to a larger instance type with more vCPUs.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up requires a reboot, causing downtime, and may not be sufficient.
- ✗
Enable Performance Insights and create a CloudWatch dashboard.
Why it's wrong here
Monitoring helps identify issues but does not directly reduce load.
- ✗
Convert the DB instance to a Multi-AZ cluster with two readable standbys.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ cluster standbys are not used for reads in MySQL.
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