AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Practice Question
A web application experiences periods of high latency during sudden surges in user traffic. The bottleneck is a spike in read operations against the application's relational database, which is only sized for average load. To improve performance during these peaks in a cost-effective manner, which AWS service should a Solutions Architect recommend?
Use Amazon ElastiCache to add a managed in-memory cache that absorbs read traffic during spikes.
Vertically scale the database instance class to provide more CPU and memory when traffic increases.
Create Amazon RDS read replicas in multiple Regions to distribute read requests geographically.
Partition (shard) the database into multiple independent datastores to spread the read demand.
Amazon ElastiCache provides a managed, in-memory data store (Redis or Memcached). By adding a cache-aside layer in front of the relational database, frequently requested data is served from memory instead of the database, reducing latency and off-loading read traffic. This approach scales horizontally and avoids the cost and complexity of constantly over-provisioning the database.
Other options are less optimal:
Configuring cross-Region read replicas can help with global latency but adds replication lag, management overhead, and higher cost.
Simply scaling the database instance up increases cost and provides limited elasticity for unpredictable spikes.
Sharding the database distributes load but adds significant application and operational complexity.
Therefore, introducing Amazon ElastiCache is the best fit for a cost-effective, highly performing solution.
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