CLF-C02 Practice Question 47: In Memory Caching
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 5 · question 7 of 10
A news website stores its articles in an Amazon RDS database. During major stories the database slows down, and monitoring shows that most of the load comes from reading the same few popular articles again and again. Which service should the company add in front of the database to reduce this read load and speed up responses?
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Answer:
Amazon ElastiCache is a managed in-memory data store and cache that works with the Valkey, Memcached and Redis OSS engines. The application first checks the cache for a popular article and reads it from memory, going to the database only when the article is not already cached. Repeated reads of the same few items stop reaching RDS at all, which cuts database load and shortens response times.
Option A, Amazon DynamoDB, is a NoSQL database. Moving to it would mean redesigning how articles are stored, and it is a database rather than a cache in front of the existing one. Option B, Amazon Redshift, is a data warehouse for analytical queries across large data sets, not for serving individual web pages quickly. Option C is a common mistake: in a Multi-AZ DB instance deployment, the standby replica exists for failover and does not serve read traffic, so it takes no load off the primary.
References: What is Amazon ElastiCache?; What is Amazon RDS?