Question

A media company runs a three-tier web application on Amazon EC2 behind an Application Load Balancer, backed by a single Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance. During peak hours, the application slows down significantly. Investigation shows the web and app tiers scale well with an Auto Scaling group, but the database CPU is saturated almost entirely by heavy analytical and reporting SELECT queries generated by an internal dashboard. Write traffic remains low. The team wants to relieve the database bottleneck while keeping changes minimal and cost-effective. What should the solutions architect recommend?

Accepted Answer

Add one or more Amazon RDS read replicas and route the dashboard's read-only reporting queries to a read replica endpoint.

Answer

Enable Multi-AZ deployment on the RDS instance so the standby handles the reporting query load.

Answer

Vertically scale the RDS instance to the largest available instance class and enable Performance Insights.

Answer

Migrate the application database to Amazon DynamoDB and rewrite the reporting queries to use scan operations.