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Getting Started with Databases: Key Characteristics and Benefits of Amazon RDS Read Replicas

Learn about the key characteristics of Amazon RDS read replicas, including cross-region support, promotion to standalone instances, and read scalability.

Table of Contents

Question

Which of the following are characteristics of Amazon RDS read replicas? (Choose THREE.)

A. Can be manually promoted to a standalone database instance
B. Database engine version upgrades happen on primary
C. Can be within an Availability Zone, cross-Availability Zone, or cross-Region
D. All instances are accessible and can be used ore read scalability
E. Synchronous block-level replication
F. Instant replication for each primary

Answer

A. Can be manually promoted to a standalone database instance
C. Can be within an Availability Zone, cross-Availability Zone, or cross-Region
D. All instances are accessible and can be used ore read scalability

Explanation

Amazon RDS read replicas use asynchronous replication. All read replicas are accessible and can be used for read scaling. Read replicas can be within an Availability Zone, across Availability Zones, or across Regions.

The database engine version upgrade is independent from the source instance. Read replicas can be manually promoted to a standalone database instance.

Amazon RDS read replicas have the following key characteristics:

A. Read replicas can be manually promoted to become standalone database instances. This allows you to create an independent database if needed, such as for disaster recovery or testing purposes.

C. Read replicas support flexible placement options. They can be created within the same Availability Zone as the primary instance, in a different Availability Zone within the same region (cross-AZ), or even in a separate AWS Region (cross-region). This enables you to locate read replicas close to your applications for low latency reads.

D. All read replica instances are accessible and can be used to scale read operations. You can direct read-heavy database workloads to the read replicas, while the primary instance handles write operations. This allows you to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single database instance for read-heavy workloads.

The incorrect options are:

B. Database engine version upgrades do not happen on the primary instance. Instead, you perform version upgrades manually on read replicas first to avoid impacting the primary during the upgrade process.

E. Read replication uses asynchronous replication, not synchronous block-level replication. This means there can be a brief lag between the primary and read replicas.

F. Replication to read replicas is not instant for each primary instance. There is a slight replication lag due to the asynchronous nature of the replication process.

In summary, Amazon RDS read replicas provide scalability, placement flexibility, and promotion capabilities to enhance read performance and enable high availability for your database workloads.

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