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Difficulty: HardAWS Database Services

A gaming company has its primary transactional data stored in an Amazon RDS database. To support a new multiplayer feature, they need to implement a real-time leaderboard that displays player rankings with sub-millisecond latency. The leaderboard must handle rapid read and write spikes without degrading the performance of the main relational database. Which AWS service should the company integrate to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Amazon Redshift
  2. B
    Amazon DynamoDB
  3. Amazon ElastiCacheAnswer
  4. D
    Amazon EC2 with self-hosted Memcached

Answer

Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed, in-memory data store and cache that supports sub-millisecond latency. It is specifically designed to cache database queries and run real-time leaderboards (using Redis sorted sets), which offloads read spikes from the primary Amazon RDS database with minimal management overhead.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the technical requirements of the scenario.
The database solution must support sub-millisecond latency, handle rapid traffic spikes, offload reads from Amazon RDS, and run with minimal operational overhead.
This establishes the performance and management criteria needed to select the correct service.
2
Compare the performance capabilities of the proposed services.
Only Amazon ElastiCache, an in-memory caching service, delivers sub-millisecond response times. Other database options like Amazon DynamoDB provide single-digit millisecond latency, which is too slow for the requirement.
This rules out standard NoSQL and relational databases based on the strict latency requirement.
3
Evaluate the management model and operational overhead.
Using a managed service like Amazon ElastiCache requires minimal operational overhead, whereas self-hosting Memcached on Amazon EC2 shifts patching, backups, and scaling responsibilities to the customer.
This rules out self-hosted options on EC2 in favor of fully managed AWS services.

Key Concept

AWS Database Services
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Topics

AWS Database Services

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