What should a solutions architect do to improve the application performance?

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In: SAA-C02
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A company is running a multi-tier ecommerce web application in the AWS Cloud.The application runs on Amazon EC2 Instances with an Amazon RDS MySQLMulti-AZ DB instance.Amazon RDS is configured with the latest generation instance with 2,000 GB of storage in a General Purpose SSD (gp3) Amazon ElasticBlock Store (Amazon EBS) volume.The database performance affects the application during periods of high demand.A database administrator analyzes the logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and discovers that the application performance always degrades when the number of read and write IOPS is higher than 20,000.

What should a solutions architect do to improve the application performance?

Replace the volume with a magnetic volume.

Increase the number of IOPS on the gp3 volume.

Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume.

Replace the 2,000 GB volume with two 1,000 GB gp3 volumes.

Explanations:

Magnetic volumes are outdated and unsuitable for performance-sensitive applications. They offer much lower IOPS compared to SSD options, which will not resolve the issue.

gp3 volumes come with baseline IOPS, but increasing IOPS directly may not be as effective as switching to a volume type that supports higher, more consistent IOPS.

Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes provide high, consistent IOPS (up to 64,000 IOPS), which is ideal for workloads with high read/write demand. This improves database performance.

Splitting into two 1,000 GB gp3 volumes will not address the underlying issue, as it does not increase the maximum IOPS per volume. The IOPS limit would still be the same.

2025-09-30

1 Comment

  1. Charlotte
    Author

    I categorize that the answer is:
    Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume.

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