DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is building a microservices architecture using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate with each other. Which TWO AWS services can be used for service discovery?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Elastic Load Balancing (which handles traffic distribution) with service discovery, or they assume that any AWS service with 'registry' or 'store' in its name (like ECR or Parameter Store) can be used for discovering running services, when in fact only Cloud Map and Route 53 provide the necessary DNS and API-based discovery capabilities.
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
✓
AWS Cloud Map
AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows you to define custom names for your application resources and maintain the updated location of these dynamically changing resources. For Amazon ECS with Fargate, you can register each service instance with Cloud Map, and other services can then discover them via DNS queries or API calls, enabling seamless inter-service communication in a microservices architecture.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon ECR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon ECR (Elastic Container Registry) is a fully managed Docker container registry that allows developers to store, manage, and deploy container images. While essential for packaging and deploying microservices, ECR's function is purely image management and distribution. It does not provide any mechanism for running services to locate or communicate with other services at runtime, which is the core purpose of service discovery.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
AWS Cloud Map is a fully managed service discovery solution specifically designed for cloud-native applications, including microservices. It allows developers to register any application resource, such as containers, EC2 instances, or serverless functions, with custom names. Services can then discover the network locations of these registered resources using either API calls or standard DNS queries, making it highly flexible for dynamic environments.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones. While crucial for high availability and scalability by routing requests to healthy instances, ELB itself is a traffic distribution mechanism, not a service discovery system. It relies on other services, like Cloud Map or manual registration, to identify the backend targets it should distribute traffic to.
- ✗
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
Why it's wrong here
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets. While it can store static configuration values, including service endpoints or connection strings, it lacks the dynamic capabilities required for robust service discovery. Parameter Store does not offer automatic service registration, instance health checking, or the ability to dynamically update endpoints as services scale or fail, which are critical for microservices.
- ✓
Amazon Route 53
Why this is correct
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service that can be effectively utilized for DNS-based service discovery, particularly with private hosted zones. By creating DNS records (e.g., A, SRV) that map service names to their underlying IP addresses or endpoints, microservices can perform standard DNS lookups to find the network location of other services. This approach leverages a well-understood internet primitive for internal service resolution.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-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 DVA-C02 exam.