A company's reporting job that used to run in 15 minutes is now taking an hour to run. An application generates the reports. The application runs on Amazon EC2 instances and extracts data from an…

Question

Options

• AConfigure an Amazon ElastiCache cluster in front of the RDS instance. Update the reporting job
• BDeploy an RDS read replica. Update the reporting job to query the reader endpoint.
• CCreate an Amazon CloudFront distribution. Set the RDS instance as the origin. Update the
• DIncrease the size of the RDS instance.

• A
  7% (4)
• B
  79% (44)
• C
  4% (2)
• D
  11% (6)

Explanation

Deploying an RDS Read Replica directly addresses both requirements: it offloads read-heavy workloads (like report generation) from the primary instance by redirecting queries to a dedicated reader endpoint, and it improves availability because a read replica can be promoted to primary if the primary instance fails.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A (ElastiCache): ElastiCache caches data in memory and can reduce database reads, but it requires significant application-level changes for cache invalidation logic, and it does not improve RDS availability - the question explicitly requires both.
• C (CloudFront): CloudFront is a CDN designed for HTTP/HTTPS content delivery; it cannot act as a proxy for a relational database. RDS is not a valid CloudFront origin.
• D (Increase instance size): Vertical scaling may provide temporary relief but doesn't fix the root cause, adds cost, and offers no availability benefit - a single larger instance is still a single point of failure.

Memory tip: When an exam question requires both performance and availability improvements for an RDS read-heavy workload, Read Replica is almost always the answer - it scales reads horizontally AND provides a failover promotion path. Think: "Read Replica = Redundancy + Read relief."

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