Question #1693
A company operates a web application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances within an Auto Scaling group. The backend uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance. During peak traffic, the application's performance degrades, and the database encounters a significant increase in read operations.
Which two actions should a solutions architect take to address these performance issues? (Choose two.)
Enable automatic scaling for the RDS DB instance to handle increased load.
Set up a read replica for the RDS DB instance and direct read queries to it.
Implement a Multi-AZ deployment for the DB instance and route read traffic to the standby instance.
Deploy an Amazon ElastiCache cluster to cache frequent database queries.
Modify the Auto Scaling group to launch EC2 instances in the same Availability Zone as the DB instance.
Explanation
B (Read Replica): Creating a read replica allows read queries to be redirected to it, reducing the load on the primary RDS instance. This is a standard approach for scaling read-heavy workloads.
D (ElastiCache): Caching frequent database queries with ElastiCache minimizes direct read operations on the database, improving application performance.
Incorrect options:
A: RDS does not support automatic scaling of compute capacity; scaling requires manual intervention.
C: Multi-AZ deployments provide high availability but do not scale read operations, as the standby instance is passive.
E: Launching EC2 instances in the same AZ as the DB instance does not address read scaling and risks availability.
Answer
The correct answer is: BD