Mitigating Amazon RDS Performance Bottlenecks With a Read Replica

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) is a web service that allows you to create and manage a relational database in the AWS cloud. By using Amazon RDS, you can avoid the technical complexity of manually setting up and operating a highly available relational database.

By learning how to create a read-only replica instance, you can scale your applications and avoid performance bottlenecks.

In this hands-on lab, you will create a MySQL database and populate it with data. You will generate load and and run queries against the database and observe the affects.

Please note, this lab creates an Amazon RDS instance which can take up to 10 minutes to complete. Please make sure you have enough time available before starting this lab.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

• Create a MySQL database schema and apply it to an instance
• Run a timed query against a MySQL database instance
• Generate synthetic load on a MySQL database instance
• Create a read-only replica

Intended Audience

• Candidates for the AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification
• Cloud Architects
• Data Engineers
• DevOps Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• The Bash terminal
• MySQL
• Amazon RDS

The following courses and labs can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Linux Command Line Byte Session
• LPIC-1 102 Linux certification - Linux shells, scripting, and databases (1 of 6)
• Database Fundamentals for AWS - Part 1 of 2

Updates

May 5th, 2025 - Updated the lab provisioning block to address an RDS resource deprecation

February 28th, 2025 - Upgraded the Mysql version and updated screenshots

March 21st, 2024 - Resolved deployment issue

December 12th, 2023 - Addressed user ban issue and promptly added a warning

May 16th, 2023 - Updated the RDS MySQL database to the latest version