An Amazon RDS for MySQL database is deployed Multi-AZ. Heavy reporting queries from the analytics team are now slowing down customer transactions. A manager says: 'We are already paying for a second copy in another Availability Zone — just point the reports at that one.' What is the correct response?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services hard
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The options
Correct The standby in a Multi-AZ deployment does not serve queries; add one or more read replicas and point the reports at those
Correct. Multi-AZ exists for availability, not for capacity. Read replicas are the feature that adds read capacity: each has its own endpoint, and sending reporting traffic there takes it off the primary.
Not correct Connect the reporting tool to the standby's endpoint
Wrong. In the Multi-AZ instance deployment the standby is a synchronous copy kept ready for failover and is not available for reads; there is no separate endpoint for it, which is precisely what makes failover invisible to the application.
Not correct Scale the database up to a larger instance class
Wrong as the fix. It buys headroom, and you pay for the larger class every hour of every day, while the reports still compete with transactions for the same processors and buffer pool.
Not correct Migrate the database to Amazon DynamoDB
Wrong. A rewrite to a different data model is an enormous response to a read-scaling problem that has a built-in answer, and analytical reporting is not what a key-value store is good at.
Why
This pair is tested constantly and the words are almost the same, so anchor them to what they buy. Multi-AZ is availability: a synchronous standby in another Availability Zone, automatic failover, one endpoint that keeps working. Read replicas are scalability: asynchronous copies with their own endpoints, as many as you need, and they can live in another Region. Multi-AZ is for staying up; read replicas are for keeping up.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.4
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