An Aurora MySQL cluster's read traffic has grown 10x; the writer is fine but read queries queue. What's the simplest scaling path that keeps the current architecture?
A.Failover to a larger writer instance
A bigger writer scales writes, not reads.
B.Add Aurora Replicas and point read traffic at the reader endpoint
Correct. Replicas offload reads linearly with shared storage.
C.Migrate the database to DynamoDB
DynamoDB is a different data model — not 'simplest'.
D.Enable Aurora storage auto-scaling
Storage auto-scaling handles capacity, not query concurrency.
Why this answer
Aurora Replicas share the underlying cluster storage and scale out reads to up to 15 replicas; the reader endpoint load-balances connections. It's the native read-scaling lever with no schema/app migration.
Correct answer: B · Last reviewed 2026-10-26
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