SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
An e-commerce company runs its application on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB). The application uses an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster with one writer and two reader instances. During a sales event, the database CPU utilization is high, and read replicas show high replica lag. The company needs to improve the read scalability and reduce replica lag. Which THREE actions should the company take? (Choose THREE.)
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Multi-AZ with read scaling, but Multi-AZ in Aurora is for high availability only and does not distribute read traffic, while the real solutions involve adding more readers, scaling readers up, or using Auto Scaling to handle variable load.
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
✓
Add more reader instances to the cluster to distribute the read traffic.
Adding more reader instances (Option A) distributes the read workload across additional nodes, reducing the load on each reader and helping to lower replica lag. Aurora Auto Scaling (Option E) automatically adjusts the number of reader instances based on metrics like CPU utilization or replica lag, providing dynamic scaling during traffic spikes. Increasing the instance size of reader instances (Option D) provides more CPU and memory resources to each reader, enabling them to process more read queries and apply changes from the writer faster, which directly reduces replica lag.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Add more reader instances to the cluster to distribute the read traffic.
Why this is correct
More readers improve read scalability.
- ✗
Enable Multi-AZ for the cluster to improve read availability.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-AZ does not improve read performance.
- ✗
Increase the instance size of the writer instance to improve write throughput.
Why it's wrong here
Writer size helps writes but not replica lag directly.
- ✓
Increase the instance size of the reader instances to larger instance types.
Why this is correct
Larger instances can handle more read load and reduce lag.
- ✓
Enable Aurora Auto Scaling for the reader instances.
Why this is correct
Auto Scaling dynamically adjusts reader count based on load.
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