AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Question
A company is deploying a new web application that requires a relational database with read-intensive workloads and expects significant spikes in traffic during special sales events. Which AWS service should the company use to cost-effectively manage the database read traffic while ensuring high availability?
The correct answer is Amazon Aurora with Aurora Replicas. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database that can create up to 15 Aurora Replicas, all sharing the same distributed storage layer. Because the replicas read from shared storage, replication lag is typically only milliseconds, and you pay for a single copy of the data. Aurora Replicas can be placed in multiple Availability Zones and can be promoted automatically, providing high availability while scaling reads to meet sudden traffic spikes.
Amazon Neptune is a purpose-built graph database. Although Neptune does support up to 15 read replicas, it is designed for graph models rather than relational workloads, so it does not meet the application's requirements.
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is an in-memory cache, not a relational database, so it cannot serve as the primary data store for the application.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas can offload reads, but each replica has its own storage volume and (for many engines) a smaller replica limit, so Aurora offers greater read-scaling capacity and usually lower replica lag, making it the more cost-effective choice for large, spiky read traffic.
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