Which AWS service offloads the administrative burdens of operating and scaling a distributed database?

• A. Amazon RDS
• B. Amazon DocumentDB
• C. Amazon DynamoDB
• D. Amazon Neptune

Answer: (C)

The concept here is a fully managed, horizontally scalable distributed database that minimizes day-to-day operational tasks. DynamoDB fits this perfectly because it’s AWS’s fully managed NoSQL database designed to run as a distributed system across many partitions and availability zones. AWS takes care of the heavy lifting: provisioning and patching the underlying servers, automatically distributing data, handling replication and failover, backing up data, and applying software updates. You don’t have to plan capacity far in advance or manage complex sharding; you can scale throughput up or down, either manually or automatically with on-demand or auto-scaling modes, with minimal admin effort.

Other options are managed databases, but they don’t offer the same level of automatic, seamless horizontal scaling for a distributed workload. A managed relational database like RDS still requires more ongoing capacity planning and occasional architectural changes to scale, while DocumentDB and Neptune focus on specific data models (document and graph) and don’t provide DynamoDB’s broad, automatic distribution and scaling characteristics.