DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is deploying a microservices application using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The application consists of multiple services that need to communicate with each other over HTTP. The developer wants to ensure that service-to-service communication is encrypted in transit and that the services can discover each other by logical service names instead of IP addresses. Which combination of AWS services should the developer use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse service discovery with load balancing or serverless APIs, overlooking that App Mesh provides both encrypted service mesh and Cloud Map for logical name resolution, which is the exact combination needed for secure, discoverable inter-service communication.
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 App Mesh with AWS Cloud Map
AWS App Mesh provides a service mesh that handles service-to-service communication with encryption in transit using TLS, while AWS Cloud Map enables service discovery by logical names, allowing ECS services to resolve each other via DNS or API calls. Together, they meet the requirements for encrypted HTTP communication and logical name resolution without exposing IP addresses.
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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Elastic Load Balancing with AWS Systems Manager
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) primarily distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, offering high availability and scalability at the network or application layer. However, ELB does not natively provide mutual TLS (mTLS) for inter-service communication within a microservices architecture, nor does it offer dynamic service discovery capabilities. AWS Systems Manager is a collection of tools for operational insights and automation across AWS resources, not a component for networking, service discovery, or secure inter-service communication. Therefore, this combination fails to meet the requirements for mTLS and service discovery.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53 with AWS Direct Connect
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service that translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses. While crucial for external and internal DNS resolution, Route 53 does not inherently provide mutual TLS (mTLS) for securing service-to-service communication or dynamic service discovery for ephemeral microservices. AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated private network connection from an on-premises data center to AWS, enhancing bandwidth and reducing network costs, but it is a physical connectivity solution and offers no service discovery or mTLS capabilities. This pairing is unsuitable for the specified microservices requirements.
- ✗
AWS Lambda with Amazon API Gateway
Why it's wrong here
AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs code in response to events, while Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that helps developers create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. This combination is ideal for building serverless API backends, but it does not provide a service mesh for managing inter-service communication, including mutual TLS (mTLS), nor does it offer a dedicated service discovery mechanism for containerized microservices running on platforms like Amazon ECS or EKS. These services operate at a different architectural layer than what's needed for a service mesh.
- ✓
AWS App Mesh with AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy to run microservices, offering capabilities like mutual TLS (mTLS) for secure communication, traffic routing, and observability. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows developers to register and discover application resources, such as microservices, using custom names. Together, App Mesh leverages Cloud Map for dynamic service discovery, enabling secure, observable, and resilient inter-service communication within a microservices architecture, directly addressing the requirements for mTLS and service discovery.
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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.