What should the solutions architect recommend to improve the performance of the website during searches of the product catalog?
Migrate the product catalog to an Amazon Redshift database. Use the COPY command to load the product catalog tables.
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster to cache the product catalog. Use lazy loading to populate the cache.
Add an additional scaling policy to the Auto Scaling group to launch additional EC2 instances when database response is slow.
Turn on the Multi-AZ configuration for the DB instance. Configure the EC2 instances to throttle the product catalog queries that are sent to the database.
Explanations:
Migrating to Amazon Redshift is not ideal for an eCommerce catalog that does not require complex analytics, as Redshift is designed for data warehousing and complex queries. It may also introduce complexity in data loading and maintenance, which does not address the immediate performance issue.
Implementing Amazon ElastiCache for Redis allows caching of frequently accessed product catalog data. By caching these results, the number of direct queries to the MySQL database can be reduced, significantly improving response times during product searches and lowering the CPU utilization on the RDS instance.
Adding an additional scaling policy for EC2 instances does not directly address the database’s high CPU utilization. While it can help with web server load, it does not alleviate the strain on the database during product catalog searches, which is the root of the performance issue.
Turning on Multi-AZ configuration improves availability and failover capability, but it does not enhance the performance of read queries or reduce CPU utilization on the database. Additionally, throttling queries would not solve the underlying performance problem, as it would only limit query frequency rather than improving efficiency.
As I see it, the answer is:
Implement an Amazon ElastiCache for Redis cluster to cache the product catalog. Use lazy loading to populate the cache.