Answer: Deploy RDS read replicas to process the business reporting queries.

## Explanation **Correct Answer: A** Amazon RDS Read Replicas are specifically designed to handle read-heavy workloads like business reporting queries without impacting the write operations on the primary database instance. Here's why: ### Why Option A is Correct: 1. **Read/Write Separation**: Read replicas allow you to offload read traffic from the primary database instance to one or more read-only copies. 2. **No Impact on Primary**: Business reporting queries (which are typically read-only) can be directed to read replicas, leaving the primary instance free to handle write operations. 3. **Asynchronous Replication**: Read replicas use asynchronous replication, so they don't affect the performance of the primary instance. 4. **Scalability**: You can create multiple read replicas to handle increasing read traffic. ### Why Other Options are Incorrect: **Option B**: Placing an RDS instance behind an Elastic Load Balancer doesn't work because RDS instances are not designed to be load balanced in this way. ELB is for distributing traffic across multiple EC2 instances, not RDS instances. **Option C**: Scaling up (vertical scaling) to a larger instance type might improve overall performance, but it doesn't separate read and write operations. Both read and write operations would still compete for resources on the same instance. **Option D**: Deploying the DB instance in multiple Availability Zones (Multi-AZ) provides high availability and failover capability, but it doesn't separate read and write operations. Multi-AZ deployments maintain a synchronous standby replica in another AZ for failover purposes only, not for read scaling. ### Best Practice Recommendation: For this scenario, the company should: 1. Create one or more RDS Read Replicas in the same or different regions 2. Configure their business reporting application to connect to the read replica endpoint 3. Monitor replication lag to ensure data consistency for reporting 4. Consider using Amazon Aurora if they need even better read scaling capabilities (Aurora can support up to 15 read replicas with minimal replication lag)

Author: LeetQuiz Editorial Team