A company wants to reduce the time its employees spend on database maintenance tasks.

Amazon Relational Database Service reduces database administration work by managing common operational tasks. AWS documentation states that Amazon RDS manages activities including database backups, software patching, automatic failure detection, and recovery. Customers can configure settings such as backup retention periods and maintenance windows, while RDS performs the underlying managed operations. Therefore, option C is correct. Amazon RDS does not automatically guarantee better query performance than a self-managed database. Query performance depends on database design, indexing, SQL queries, instance sizing, data distribution, and workload characteristics, and customers remain responsible for query tuning. RDS also supports a defined set of database engines rather than necessarily supporting more engines than any self-managed environment. Automatic horizontal scaling for both read and write workloads is not a general feature of every RDS engine or configuration. Some engines support read replicas or specialized scaling features, but these are not equivalent to universal automatic horizontal scaling for all database operations. The primary managed-service benefit described in the question is reduced administrative effort because AWS performs routine database infrastructure maintenance, backups, and patching on the customer’s behalf.