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Difficulty: EasyHigh-Performing Database Solutions

A media company hosts a popular news portal on AWS. The portal's database tier consists of an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. During breaking news events, the portal experiences a massive surge in read traffic, causing high CPU utilization on the database and slow page loading times for readers. Writes to the database remain low. Which architectural modification should a solutions architect recommend to resolve the read performance bottleneck?

  1. Create one or more Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to route read queries to the replica endpoints.Answer
  2. B
    Enable a Multi-AZ deployment for the Amazon RDS DB instance and configure the application to load balance read queries between the primary and standby instances.
  3. C
    Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB and use the article publication date as the partition key for the table.
  4. D
    Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB and configure it in Provisioned Capacity mode with auto-scaling to handle the sudden spikes.

Answer

Create one or more Amazon RDS Read Replicas and configure the application to route read queries to the replica endpoints.
Creating one or more Amazon RDS Read Replicas and routing read queries to them allows the application to offload the read-heavy workload from the primary DB instance. This effectively reduces CPU utilization on the primary instance and resolves the performance bottleneck with minimal architectural changes.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the performance bottleneck and traffic characteristics.
The bottleneck is high CPU utilization caused exclusively by a high volume of read queries, while write operations remain low.
This determines that the solution must scale read capacity independently of write capacity.
2
Select the appropriate scaling mechanism for relational database reads in AWS.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas are identified as the standard feature designed to offload read traffic from the primary instance.
Replicas are updated asynchronously and can be queried directly to scale read throughput.
3
Evaluate alternative options and eliminate non-viable architectural designs.
Multi-AZ standby instances cannot receive traffic, and DynamoDB migration with poor key design introduces write/read bottlenecks.
Ensures the proposed architecture aligns with official AWS constraints and best practices.

Key Concept

Scaling read performance in relational databases using Amazon RDS Read Replicas.
Estimated Time:50s
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High-Performing Database Solutions

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