Question

Difficulty: EasyHigh-Performing Database Solutions

A solutions architect is designing a database solution for a web application that displays real-world financial indices. The application runs on Amazon RDS for MySQL. The database workload is highly read-heavy, with a read-to-write ratio of 10:110:1, and requires read latencies of less than 1010 milliseconds. During peak market hours, the CPU utilization on the database instance reaches 90%90\%, resulting in latency spikes. Which action should the solutions architect take to improve database read performance?

  1. Create Amazon RDS read replicas to offload read traffic from the primary DB instance, and configure the application to route read queries to the replica endpoints.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy an Amazon RDS read replica and configure it as the primary failover target for automatic failover during outages instead of using a Multi-AZ deployment.
  3. C
    Attach a shared Amazon EBS gp3 volume to multiple RDS instances to enable concurrent read access to the same database files.
  4. D
    Deploy an Amazon CloudFront distribution directly in front of the RDS database and set the default Time to Live (TTL) for caching behaviors to 00.

Answer

Create Amazon RDS read replicas to offload read traffic from the primary DB instance, and configure the application to route read queries to the replica endpoints.
Creating Amazon RDS read replicas is the standard method to scale database read performance. By routing read queries to the replica endpoints, the solutions architect offloads the CPU-intensive read workload from the primary DB instance, resolving the bottleneck while keeping write capacity on the primary intact.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the database workload requirements.
The workload has a high read-to-write ratio of 10:110:1 and requires low-latency reads under heavy load.
Identifying that the performance bottleneck is caused by read queries helps target read-scaling solutions.
2
Evaluate read-scaling mechanisms in Amazon RDS.
Amazon RDS read replicas can asynchronously replicate data from the primary DB instance to one or more read replicas.
Read replicas are designed specifically to handle read-heavy workloads by offloading read queries from the primary instance.
3
Configure the application to utilize the read replica endpoints.
Read traffic is routed to the read replicas, while write traffic continues to be sent to the primary DB instance.
This separation reduces CPU load on the primary database, lowering read latency and maintaining high performance.

Key Concept

Offloading read traffic using Amazon RDS read replicas
Rate this question