An Amazon RDS EBS-optimized instance with Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) storage is using less than half of its allocated IOPS over the course of several hours under constant load. The RDS instance…

Question

Options

• AIncrease the size of the DB instance storage
• BChange the underlying EBS storage type to General Purpose SSD (gp2)
• CDisable EBS optimization on the DB instance
• DChange the DB instance to an instance class with a higher maximum bandwidth

• A
  24% (6)
• B
  8% (2)
• C
  12% (3)
• D
  56% (14)

Explanation

Explanation

Option D is correct because the bottleneck in this scenario is network/EBS bandwidth saturation - the instance is consuming all available read throughput bandwidth despite using less than half its IOPS, CPU, and RAM. Upgrading to an instance class with higher maximum bandwidth directly resolves the throughput ceiling, allowing latency to return to sub-second levels.

• Option A is wrong because increasing storage size won't expand the instance's bandwidth ceiling - the constraint is the instance class's throughput limit, not storage capacity.
• Option B is wrong because switching to General Purpose SSD (gp2) would actually reduce performance compared to PIOPS for a high-demand workload, as gp2 offers lower, burstable IOPS rather than consistent provisioned performance.
• Option C is wrong because disabling EBS optimization removes the dedicated bandwidth channel for EBS traffic, which would worsen latency, not improve it.

Memory Tip

Think of it as a highway analogy: if cars (data) are moving at full speed but traffic is jammed because the road (bandwidth) is too narrow, adding more lanes (higher bandwidth instance class) is the fix - not adding more cars (IOPS) or changing car types (storage type).

No community discussion yet for this question.