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Amazon SAA-C03: How to Reduce High EC2 CPU Usage and Improve RDS Read Performance for Monolithic App?

Learn the best solution to reduce high EC2 CPU utilization and improve Amazon RDS read request performance for a monolithic application recently migrated to AWS. Find out how to optimize EC2 instance type, configure Auto Scaling, and leverage RDS read replicas.

Table of Contents

Question

A company recently migrated a monolithic application to an Amazon EC2 instance and Amazon RDS. The application has tightly coupled modules. The existing design of the application gives the application the ability to run on only a single EC2 instance.

The company has noticed high CPU utilization on the EC2 instance during peak usage times. The high CPU utilization corresponds to degraded performance on Amazon RDS for read requests. The company wants to reduce the high CPU utilization and improve read request performance.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

A. Resize the EC2 instance to an EC2 instance type that has more CPU capacity. Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and maximum size of 1. Configure an RDS read replica for read requests.
B. Resize the EC2 instance to an EC2 instance type that has more CPU capacity. Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and maximum size of 1. Add an RDS read replica and redirect all read/write traffic to the replica.
C. Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum size of 1 and maximum size of 2. Resize the RDS DB instance to an instance type that has more CPU capacity.
D. Resize the EC2 instance to an EC2 instance type that has more CPU capacity. Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and maximum size of 1. Resize the RDS DB instance to an instance type that has more CPU capacity.

Answer

A. Resize the EC2 instance to an EC2 instance type that has more CPU capacity. Configure an Auto Scaling group with a minimum and maximum size of 1. Configure an RDS read replica for read requests.

Explanation

The key issues are the monolithic application architecture that allows it to run on only a single EC2 instance, the high CPU utilization on the EC2 instance during peak times, and the corresponding degraded read performance on the RDS database.

To address the high EC2 CPU usage, the instance should be resized to an instance type with more CPU capacity. This will provide more processing power to handle the compute demands.

Configuring an EC2 Auto Scaling group with a min and max size of 1 ensures the application continues to run on a single EC2 instance to match its monolithic design. The Auto Scaling group will automatically replace the EC2 instance if it becomes unhealthy.

To improve read performance on the database, adding an RDS read replica and directing read requests to it will offload the read traffic from the primary database instance. The source DB instance will then be dedicated to handling the write requests. This read/write split improves performance and scalability.

The other options are incorrect because:
B) You cannot direct all read/write traffic to a read replica as it is read-only.
C) Increasing the Auto Scaling max to 2 does not align with the application’s single-instance design.
D) Resizing the RDS instance may help but does not address the read-heavy workload. A read replica is a better solution.

Therefore, resizing the EC2 instance, using an Auto Scaling group of size 1, and adding an RDS read replica for read requests is the best solution to reduce EC2 CPU utilization and improve database read performance for this monolithic application architecture.

Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 certification exam assessment practice question and answer (Q&A) dump including multiple choice questions (MCQ) and objective type questions, with detail explanation and reference available free, helpful to pass the Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 exam and earn Amazon AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate SAA-C03 certification.