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Incremental Replication

5 minutes 5 Questions

One of the key features of AWS SMS is its ability to perform incremental replication of server workloads. When performing a migration, SMS tracks changes to on-premises servers or virtual machines and only replicates the changed data to reduce bandwidth consumption and improve replication times. Th…

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AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Incremental Replication Example Questions

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Question 1

An organization runs Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server and wants to offload read traffic to a secondary instance that stays up to date via the database engine’s native, incremental (near real-time) replication rather than periodic full copies. Which option should they use?

Correct Answer: MSSQL native replication

For Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server, the engine’s native transactional replication supports continuously and incrementally updating a read-only subscriber, which can be used to offload read traffic. Snapshot replication provides point-in-time copies rather than incremental updates. EBS snapshots are storage-level backups and do not create read replicas. AWS Database Migration Service can perform ongoing CDC for migrations, but it does not create an engine-native read replica and is not the recommended approach for SQL Server read scaling within RDS.

Question 2

A gaming company wants to enable incremental replication for its Aurora DB cluster. They have read-heavy workloads on their production database and want to offload the incoming read traffic to read replicas. Which is the most cost-effective solution?

Correct Answer: Create multiple Amazon Aurora replicas

In the given scenario, Amazon Aurora replicas provide the most cost-effective solution for incremental replication as it is natively supported and minimizes downtime. Other solutions involve additional costs, complex setup, or do not provide native support for incremental replication and read traffic offloading.

Question 3

A company needs continuous, incremental replication of a DynamoDB table from its primary AWS account (Account A) to an identical table in a separate disaster recovery AWS account (Account B). The solution must be cross-account, near real time, and use AWS-native services. Which approach should you choose?

Correct Answer: Use DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda

DynamoDB Streams captures item-level changes in near real time. You can invoke a Lambda function on stream records and assume a cross-account role to write the corresponding inserts, updates, and deletes to a destination table in the DR account. This delivers continuous, incremental, cross-account replication with minimal infrastructure to manage. Copying the table is a one-time bulk operation and does not provide ongoing incremental replication. Amazon Kinesis is not a native DynamoDB replication target and would still require custom integration and write logic to the destination table. DynamoDB does not support RDS-style read replicas, and global tables do not replicate across different AWS accounts.

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