CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
Which AWS service is used to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple EC2 instances to improve availability and fault tolerance?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse Amazon Route 53's DNS routing policies (like weighted or latency-based routing) with actual load balancing, but Route 53 only resolves DNS queries and does not manage traffic distribution to EC2 instances at the application or network layer.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Elastic Load Balancing
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in one or more Availability Zones. By doing so, it increases the fault tolerance of your application because if one instance fails, the load balancer routes traffic to the remaining healthy instances, ensuring high availability. ELB supports multiple types (Application, Network, and Gateway Load Balancers) to handle different traffic patterns and protocols.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Amazon Route 53
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Route 53 is a DNS web service, translating human-friendly domain names into IP addresses. While it can return multiple IP addresses for a domain and perform simple DNS-based round-robin, it does not actively distribute live traffic based on server load, health, or capacity. Route 53 does not terminate incoming connections or reroute in real time when an EC2 instance fails, so it is not a substitute for a load balancer.
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Amazon CloudFront
Why it's wrong here
Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of static and dynamic web content by caching copies at edge locations. Its primary job is to reduce latency and offload requests from origin servers, not to distribute application traffic across a fleet of EC2 instances based on current utilization. CloudFront routes requests to the nearest edge location and can fetch from an origin, but it does not perform load balancing across compute instances for availability and fault tolerance.
- ✓
Elastic Load Balancing
Why this is correct
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is the AWS service specifically designed to automatically distribute incoming application or network traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, in one or more Availability Zones. ELB performs health checks on registered instances and routes traffic only to healthy instances, thereby improving fault tolerance and availability. It also integrates with Auto Scaling to dynamically add and remove instances while continuously balancing traffic, making it the correct answer for distributing traffic across EC2 instances.
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AWS Auto Scaling
Why it's wrong here
AWS Auto Scaling is responsible for maintaining the desired number of EC2 instances by automatically scaling the fleet in or out based on conditions like CPU utilization or scheduled times. It does not route or direct any incoming requests; instead, it changes the capacity of the environment. When used with Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling registers new instances with the load balancer, but the load balancer is the component that actually receives and distributes traffic, so Auto Scaling alone cannot balance load across instances.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.