Question

Difficulty: EasyHigh-Performing Database Solutions

A company's reporting application queries an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. During business hours, the database experiences high CPU utilization and performance degradation due to a high volume of read-only queries. A solutions architect needs to design a solution to offload the read traffic and reduce database latency. Which solution will meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Enable Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment and configure the application to route read queries to the standby database instance.
  2. B
    Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB and use sequential timestamps as the partition key to optimize read performance.
  3. Create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to route read queries to the read replica endpoints.Answer
  4. D
    Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB and configure Provisioned Capacity mode to handle unpredictable and spiky read requests.

Answer

Create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to route read queries to the read replica endpoints.
The correct answer is to create Amazon RDS Read Replicas and route read-only queries to them. This directly offloads the read traffic from the primary database instance, reducing CPU utilization and query latency.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the database workload requirements.
The application suffers from performance issues caused specifically by read-only queries.
Identifying the bottleneck as read-heavy allows for targeting the read path rather than writing or compute resources.
2
Evaluate high-performing database options for offloading read traffic in relational databases.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide read-only copies of the primary database instance that can handle read queries.
Read replicas are designed specifically to scale read capacity horizontally and reduce latency for read-heavy workloads.
3
Select the option that configures the application to point read traffic to these new endpoints.
Configuring the application to route read queries to the read replica endpoints offloads the primary database.
This configuration directly addresses the performance degradation of the primary instance during peak hours.

Key Concept

Scaling read capacity using Amazon RDS Read Replicas
Rate this question