SAA-C03 Q240 · Database

Question

A company hosts a database that runs on an Amazon RDS instance deployed to multiple Availability Zones. A periodic script negatively affects a critical application by querying the database. How can application performance be improved with minimal costs?

Accepted Answer

**Answer B: Create a read replica and direct the script to it.**

**Problem Analysis:**
- A periodic script is running queries against the primary RDS instance
- These queries are consuming resources (CPU, I/O, memory) that the critical application needs
- The application performance degrades when the script runs

**Why a Read Replica solves this:**
1. **Offloads read traffic**: The script's queries are read operations (it's querying, not writing). A read replica handles these reads on a completely separate instance.
2. **Isolates the primary instance**: The critical application continues to use the primary instance without resource contention from the script.
3. **Minimal cost**: A single read replica costs roughly the same as one additional RDS instance — no architectural redesign, no co

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🏗️ Architecture

⚙️ Operations

💰 Cost

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