AWS Solution Architect Associate Questions | Databases
📌 Notice
This is a Quiz accompanying the blog post:
“Pass the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Certification SAA-C03-(Episode 20: Databases)”
🔹 Focus: AWS Cloud Practitioner Preparation Quiz
🔹 For theoretical concepts and exam-style questions, please refer to the main blog post.
Question 1
Domain: Design Secure Architectures
The flagship application for a gaming company connects to an Amazon Aurora database and the entire technology stack is currently deployed in the United States. Now, the company has plans to expand to Europe and Asia for its operations. It needs the games table to be accessible globally but needs the users and games_played tables to be regional only.
How would you implement this with minimal application refactoring?
Overall explanation
✅ Correct option:
Use an Amazon Aurora Global Database for the games table and use Amazon Aurora for the users and games_played tables
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 128TB per database instance. Aurora is not an in-memory database.
Amazon Aurora Global Database is designed for globally distributed applications, allowing a single Amazon Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions. It replicates your data with no impact on database performance, enables fast local reads with low latency in each region, and provides disaster recovery from region-wide outages. Amazon Aurora Global Database is the correct choice for the given use-case.
For the given use-case, we, therefore, need to have two Aurora clusters, one for the global table (games table) and the other one for the local tables (users and games_played tables).
❌ Incorrect options:
Use an Amazon Aurora Global Database for the games table and use Amazon DynamoDB tables for the users and games_played tables
Use a Amazon DynamoDB global table for the games table and use Amazon Aurora for the users and games_played tables
Use a Amazon DynamoDB global table for the games table and use Amazon DynamoDB tables for the users and games_played tables
Here, we want minimal application refactoring. Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora have a completely different APIs, due to Amazon Aurora being SQL and Amazon DynamoDB being NoSQL. So all three options are incorrect, as they have Amazon DynamoDB as one of the components.
Reference:
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/faqs/
Question 2
Domain : Design Resilient Architectures
A new DevOps engineer has just joined a development team and wants to understand the replication capabilities for Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployment as well as Amazon RDS Read-replicas.
Which of the following correctly summarizes these capabilities for the given database?
Overall explanation
✅ Correct option:
Multi-AZ follows synchronous replication and spans at least two Availability Zones (AZs) within a single region. Read replicas follow asynchronous replication and can be within an Availability Zone (AZ), Cross-AZ, or Cross-Region
Amazon RDS Multi-AZ deployments provide enhanced availability and durability for RDS database (DB) instances, making them a natural fit for production database workloads. When you provision a Multi-AZ DB Instance, Amazon RDS automatically creates a primary DB Instance and synchronously replicates the data to a standby instance in a different Availability Zone (AZ). Multi-AZ spans at least two Availability Zones (AZs) within a single region.
Amazon RDS Read Replicas provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database (DB) instances. They make it easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads. For the MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server database engines, Amazon RDS creates a second DB instance using a snapshot of the source DB instance. It then uses the engines’ native asynchronous replication to update the read replica whenever there is a change to the source DB instance.
Amazon RDS replicates all databases in the source DB instance. Read replicas can be within an Availability Zone (AZ), Cross-AZ, or Cross-Region.
Exam Alert:
❌ Incorrect Options:
Multi-AZ follows asynchronous replication and spans one Availability Zone (AZ) within a single region. Read replicas follow synchronous replication and can be within an Availability Zone (AZ), Cross-AZ, or Cross-Region
Multi-AZ follows asynchronous replication and spans at least two Availability Zones (AZs) within a single region. Read replicas follow synchronous replication and can be within an Availability Zone (AZ), Cross-AZ, or Cross-Region
Multi-AZ follows asynchronous replication and spans at least two Availability Zones (AZs) within a single region. Read replicas follow asynchronous replication and can be within an Availability Zone (AZ), Cross-AZ, or Cross-Region
These three options contradict the earlier details provided in the explanation. To summarize, Multi-AZ deployment follows synchronous replication for Amazon RDS. Hence these options are incorrect.
References:
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/multi-az/
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/features/read-replicas/
