An ecommerce website running on AWS uses an Amazon RDS for MySQL DB instance with General Purpose SSD storage. The developers chose an appropriate instance type based on demand, and configured 100 GB of storage with a sufficient amount of free space. The website was running smoothly for a few weeks until a marketing campaign launched. On the second day of the campaign, users reported long wait times and time outs. Amazon CloudWatch metrics indicated that both reads and writes to the DB instance were experiencing long response times. The CloudWatch metrics show 40% to 50% CPU and memory utilization, and sufficient free storage space is still available. The application server logs show no evidence of database connectivity issues. What could be the root cause of the issue with the marketing campaign?

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The marketing campaign likely caused a sudden increase in traffic to the website, which in turn led to a higher number of database connections. If the RDS for MySQL DB instance has a maximum number of allowed connections configured, it could have been reached during the campaign, resulting in connection timeouts and long wait times.

An Ecommerce Website Running on AWS Uses an Amazon RDS