An IT firm is using AWS cloud infrastructure for its three-tier web application. They are using memory-optimized EC2 instances for application hosting & SQL based database servers deployed in Multi-AZ with auto-failover. Recently, there are observing heavy loads on database servers. This is impacting user data lookup from application servers resulting in slow access. As AWS Consultants, they are looking for guidance to resolve this issue. Which of the following will provide a faster scalable option to deliver data to users without impacting backend servers?

Answer options:

A.Use Amazon ElastiCache to cache data.
B.Configure the Multi-AZ replicas to serve the read traffic.
C.Use Amazon CloudFront to save recently accessed data in cache.
D.Use on-host caching on memory optimised EC2 instance.

Correct Answer – A
Amazon ElastiCache provides a scalable faster approach to cache data which can be used with both SQL/NoSQL databases. These can be used to save application data, significantly improving latency & throughout the application and offloading load on back-end database servers.
Option B is incorrect as a Multi-AZ replica is used for data redundancy. It is not used to share the read traffic.
Option C is incorrect as Amazon CloudFront is more suitable for website caching & not for application caching.
Option D is incorrect as this would provide a faster lookup of data, but it’s not scalable.
For more information on using Amazon ElastiCache, refer to the following URLs-
https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/performance-at-scale-with-amazon-elasticache.pdf