Amazon RDS

Question 1

What is Amazon RDS?

Answer 1

Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service that automates provisioning, patching, backups, scaling, and high availability.

Question 2

What database engines does Amazon RDS support?

Answer 2

Amazon Aurora
MySQL
PostgreSQ
MariaDB
Oracle Database
Microsoft SQL Server

Question 3

What are key benefits of RDS?

Answer 3

Automated backups
Automated patching;
Multi-AZ for high availability
Read replicas
Monitoring via CloudWatch
Encryption at rest and in transit

Question 4

What is Multi-AZ in RDS?

Answer 4

A high-availability deployment option that creates a synchronous standby in another Availability Zone for automatic failover.

Question 5

Does Multi-AZ improve read performance?

Answer 5

No. Multi-AZ is for high availability, not read scaling.

Question 6

What are Read Replicas used for?

Answer 6

Read scaling
Reporting workloads
Disaster recovery
Cross-region replication

Question 7

Can Read Replicas be promoted?

Answer 7

Yes. They can be promoted to standalone DB instances.

Question 8

Difference between Multi-AZ and Read Replica?

Answer 8

Multi-AZ → HA (synchronous replication)
Read Replica → Read scaling (asynchronous replication)

Question 9

What is Vertical Scaling in RDS?

Answer 9

Increasing instance size (CPU/RAM).

Question 10

What is Horizontal Scaling in RDS?

Answer 10

Adding Read Replicas.

Question 11

Which RDS engine supports automatic storage scaling?

Answer 11

Most modern RDS engines support storage autoscaling such as :
Amazon RDS for MySQL
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
Amazon RDS for PostgresSQL
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
Amazon RDS for for Oracle

Question 12

What are Automated Backups?

Answer 12

Daily full backups + transaction logs for point-in-time recovery (PITR).

Question 13

Default backup retention period for RDS?

Answer 13

7 days (configurable up to 35 days).

Question 14

What are DB Snapshots?

Answer 14

Manual backups retained until deleted.

Question 15

Can you restore RDS to a specific second?

Answer 15

Yes, using Point-In-Time Recovery.

Question 16

How is RDS secured at the network level?

Answer 16

VPC
Security Groups
NACLs

Question 17

How do you encrypt RDS at rest?

Answer 17

Using AWS KMS keys.

Question 18

What happens if you enable encryption after DB creation?

Answer 18

You must take a snapshot and restore into a new encrypted instance.

Question 19

How is data encrypted in transit?

Answer 19

Using SSL/TLS connections.

Question 20

What service monitors RDS metrics?

Answer 20

Amazon CloudWatch.

Question 21

What is Enhanced Monitoring?

Answer 21

Provides OS-level metrics.

Question 22

What is Performance Insights?

Answer 22

A tool to analyze database load and query performance.

Question 23

A production database must survive AZ failure automatically. What should you use?

Answer 23

Multi-AZ deployment.

Question 24

A reporting application is causing performance issues. What is the best solution?

Answer 24

Add a Read Replica.

Question 25

You need cross-region disaster recovery. What should you configure?

Answer 25

Cross-region Read Replica.

Question 26

You need a database that scales reads to 15 replicas automatically.

Answer 26

Aurora (supports up to 15 read replicas).

Question 27

What makes Aurora more performant than standard MySQL/Postgres?

Answer 27

Distributed storage across 3 AZs, 6 copies of data.

Question 28

How can you reduce RDS costs for dev/test?

Answer 28

Stop instances (non-production) Use smaller instance types Use Single-AZ Use Reserved Instances

Question 29

How to manage RDS DB connections efficiently?

Answer 29

Use RDS Proxy

Question 30

What is RDS Proxy benefit?

Answer 30

Connection pooling