A company runs a multi-tier ecommerce application on Amazon EC2 with an Amazon RDS for MySQL Multi-AZ DB instance. RDS uses the latest generation instance with 2,000 GB of storage on a General Purpose SSD (gp3) EBS volume. During peak demand, application performance degrades when read and write IOPS exceed 20,000. What should a solutions architect do to improve database performance?

The correct answer is to replace the volume with a Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volume. The problem states that performance degrades when IOPS exceed 20,000. While gp3 volumes offer good performance, their maximum IOPS are 16,000. Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes are designed for critical, high-performance applications and can deliver significantly higher IOPS, up to 256,000, making them suitable for this workload. Replacing the volume with a magnetic volume would drastically worsen performance, as magnetic volumes have much lower IOPS capabilities. Increasing the number of IOPS on the gp3 volume is not possible beyond its 16,000 IOPS limit. Replacing the 2,000 GB gp3 volume with two 1,000 GB gp3 volumes would not increase the maximum IOPS per volume, and RDS does not support striping across multiple volumes for a single database instance.