A SysOps administrator must reduce RDS failover time by at least 10% in a highly available deployment (EC2 Auto Scaling behind an ALB and an RDS Multi-AZ database). Which change will achieve this reduction?

Placing an RDS Proxy in front of the database and having the application connect to the proxy endpoint is the correct solution because RDS Proxy significantly reduces failover times for Multi-AZ deployments. When a failover occurs, the proxy automatically routes connections to the new primary instance, masking the change from the application and maintaining existing connections. This eliminates the need for applications to re-establish connections, which is a major contributor to failover latency. Increasing the instance class size of the RDS database improves performance but does not directly reduce failover time. Changing to a single Availability Zone removes high availability and increases downtime risk. Standing up a cross-Region read replica is for disaster recovery, not for reducing failover time within a Multi-AZ deployment, and promotion is a manual or semi-manual process.