A financial company has allocated an Amazon RDS MariaDB DB instance with large storage capacity to accommodate migration efforts. Post-migration, the company purged unwanted data from the instance…

Question

Options

• ACreate a snapshot of the old databases and restore the snapshot with the required storage
• BCreate a new RDS DB instance with the required storage and move the databases from the old
• CCreate a new database using native backup and restore
• DCreate a new read replica and make it the primary by terminating the existing primary

• A
  16% (5)
• B
  71% (22)
• C
  10% (3)
• D
  3% (1)

Explanation

Explanation

Option B is correct because Amazon RDS does not support storage downsizing in place - once storage is allocated, it can only scale up, never down. Creating a new RDS DB instance with the required (smaller) storage size and migrating the data allows the old instance to remain fully operational during the migration, minimizing production impact and achieving near-zero downtime through careful cutover.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• Option A is incorrect because restoring an RDS snapshot creates an instance with the same or larger storage size as the original - you cannot specify a smaller storage size during snapshot restore than what was originally allocated.
• Option C is partially viable but refers to a native (OS/application-level) backup and restore approach, which is more complex, error-prone, and not the cleanest AWS-native solution compared to creating a managed RDS instance.
• Option D is incorrect because read replicas inherit the storage configuration of the primary instance - promoting a read replica will not reduce storage size, as it mirrors the original allocation.

Memory Tip: Remember the phrase "RDS storage only grows, never shrinks" - whenever a question asks about downsizing RDS storage, the answer will always involve creating a new RDS instance with the desired smaller storage, not modifying or restoring the existing one.

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