DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is deploying a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS using Fargate launch type. The services need to communicate with each other. The developer wants to use service discovery so that services can find each other by name. Which AWS service should the developer use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse Route 53 private hosted zones with AWS Cloud Map, not realizing that Cloud Map provides the dynamic registration and health check integration needed for ephemeral containers, whereas Route 53 alone requires manual record management.
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 the correct choice because it is a cloud resource discovery service that allows microservices to register their DNS names and health checks, enabling dynamic service discovery. With Amazon ECS and Fargate, services can use AWS Cloud Map namespaces (either API-based or DNS-based) to resolve each other by logical service names, which is essential for 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 Route 53 private hosted zones
Why it's wrong here
While Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones can resolve internal DNS names, they lack the native integration and automation required for dynamic service discovery in a microservices architecture with frequently changing container instances. Manually updating DNS records for every service instance lifecycle event (start, stop, scale) would be operationally burdensome and error-prone, making it unsuitable for the agility needed in ECS.
- ✗
Amazon ECR
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) serves exclusively as a fully managed Docker container image registry. Its primary function is to securely store, manage, and deploy container images, providing versioning and lifecycle management capabilities. ECR does not offer any functionality for service discovery, which involves registering and locating running service instances within a network.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer
Why it's wrong here
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) operates at layer 7 and is designed to distribute incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances or containers. While essential for exposing services and load balancing, an ALB itself does not provide service discovery; it relies on target groups to register backend instances. It routes traffic *to* discovered services, rather than performing the discovery function.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
AWS Cloud Map is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed service discovery solution that allows microservices to locate each other dynamically. It integrates natively with Amazon ECS, automatically registering and deregistering service instances as they scale up or down. This enables applications to discover service endpoints using either API calls or DNS queries, simplifying inter-service communication in a dynamic containerized environment.
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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.