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SAP-C02 Practice Question 25: Cross Region Reads Single Endpoint

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional (SAP-C02) · Test 3 · question 5 of 10

Design for New Solutionsmedium

A SaaS product runs on Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition in us-east-1. A growing European user base now generates about a third of the traffic, and those users see 90 ms to 120 ms of added latency on every page because each page issues several database reads across the Atlantic.

The company will deploy application servers in eu-west-1. The read-heavy pages must be served from data in Europe, but roughly 5 percent of the European requests also perform a write, and the application is a single legacy codebase that opens one connection pool to one database endpoint and issues reads and writes through it. The team has no budget to split the data access layer into separate read and write paths, there must remain exactly one authoritative copy of the data, and replication lag to Europe must stay around a second.

What should the solutions architect recommend?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • B. Convert the cluster to an Aurora global database, add a secondary cluster in eu-west-1, and enable write forwarding so the European application servers use the secondary's endpoint for both reads and writes

An Aurora global database replicates from the primary Region to secondary Regions with typical lag of about a second, which covers the read latency requirement. Write forwarding is what makes it fit the *unchanged application* constraint: with write forwarding enabled, the secondary cluster accepts SQL statements that perform writes and forwards them to the primary cluster, which applies them and replicates the result back. Aurora sets up the cross-Region networking and carries the session and transaction context, so the European deployment keeps one connection pool against one endpoint and needs no read/write splitting. The primary cluster remains the single source of truth.

Option A gets the reads close to the users but breaks the 5 percent of requests that write; a cross-Region read replica is read-only, and those statements fail. Fixing that would require the data-access rewrite the company has ruled out.

Option C is a re-architecture, not a latency fix. Moving a relational schema with joins and transactions onto DynamoDB means rewriting the application's data layer and its queries, which is far beyond the stated budget.

Option D is not a configuration Aurora offers. A Multi-AZ deployment places instances in Availability Zones within one Region, not across Regions, and an RDS Multi-AZ standby does not serve reads.

Reference: Using write forwarding in an Amazon Aurora global database

Practice Test 3 ›

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