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 an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)General Purpose SSD (gp2) volume.The database performance impacts the application during periods of high demand.After analyzing the logs in Amazon CloudWatch Logs, a database administrator finds that the application performance always degrades when the number of read and write IOPS is higher than 6.000.

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 gp2 volume.

Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume.

Replace the 2,000 GB gp2 volume with two 1,000 GBgp2 volumes.

Explanations:

Magnetic volumes provide lower performance compared to SSD volumes. They are not suitable for high IOPS workloads, especially for a multi-tier ecommerce application requiring better performance.

gp2 volumes automatically provide a baseline performance of 3 IOPS per GB with the ability to burst to higher IOPS. However, increasing the IOPS on a gp2 volume beyond its baseline capability (which is limited) is not possible as it’s not a provisioned IOPS volume. Therefore, this option would not resolve the performance issue.

Replacing the gp2 volume with a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume allows for specifying a higher IOPS rate directly, which is beneficial for workloads with high read/write demands. This will directly address the performance degradation seen when IOPS exceed 6,000.

While splitting the volume into two 1,000 GB gp2 volumes might provide some improvement due to increased overall IOPS, it does not guarantee that the combined performance will meet or exceed the demands during high IOPS periods. Also, it does not leverage the capabilities of Provisioned IOPS for sustained high performance.

2026-04-07

2 Comments

  1. Kayla
    Author

    I design that the answer is:
    Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume.

  2. Larry
    Author

    I opine that the answer is:
    Replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS (PIOPS) volume.

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