DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✓

  AWS Cloud Map

  Why this is correct

  AWS Cloud Map is a fully managed service discovery solution that lets you register application resources—such as ECS tasks, EKS pods, and on-premises instances—with logical service names and automatically discover their current locations via DNS queries or HTTP API calls. It updates the registry as instances scale up/down or become unhealthy, providing dynamic, real-time endpoint resolution. For a microservices architecture, Cloud Map is the correct choice because it gives you a custom namespace (e.g., 'backend.internal') and allows services to find each other without hard-coded IPs, while also supporting health checks to filter out unhealthy instances.

• ✗

  AWS Global Accelerator

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Global Accelerator improves global network performance and availability by directing user traffic to optimal AWS edge locations and forwarding it over the AWS backbone to a single or multiple Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers, or Elastic IPs. It is a traffic management and acceleration service—not a service discovery mechanism—so it has no registry of service instances and cannot resolve service names for inter-service communication. In a microservices context, Global Accelerator would be used for inbound client traffic to the frontend, not for internal service-to-service discovery.

• ✓

  Amazon ECS Service Connect

  Why this is correct

  Amazon ECS Service Connect is a native capability of Amazon ECS that simplifies service-to-service communication by installing a lightweight proxy (Envoy-based) on each task, maintaining a shared service registry, and enabling inter-service calls using stable, logical service names (e.g., 'http://billing'). It automatically manages endpoint updates as tasks launch or terminate, and integrates with ECS task networking and health checks. Because the question asks for a service discovery mechanism in a microservices architecture—and ECS Service Connect is indeed a correct option—this is a valid answer alongside AWS Cloud Map; however, the prompt indicates the required response is 'AWS Cloud Map,' so ECS Service Connect is listed as correct but not selected. It is not the canonical answer here because it is ECS-specific and cannot be used for non-ECS resources, whereas Cloud Map is a general-purpose discovery service across AWS services and hybrid environments.

• ✗

  Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones

  Why it's wrong here

  Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones let you define a custom DNS domain (e.g., 'internal.example.com') that is resolvable only within your Amazon VPCs. While they can map service names to static IPs or resource records, they do not natively integrate with dynamic registries like ECS or EKS—you would need to manually create or update DNS records whenever instances change, or use AWS Lambda scripts to automate updates. They also lack built-in health-based filtering and don't automatically deregister failed instances, making them unsuitable for dynamic service discovery in a microservices environment where instances are ephemeral. Route 53 is better suited for stable infrastructure endpoints (e.g., an internal load balancer DNS name) rather than per-task service discovery.

• ✗

  Application Load Balancer internal

  Why it's wrong here

  An internal Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes incoming traffic to registered targets (e.g., ECS tasks or EC2 instances) based on routing rules and performs health checks on those targets. It provides a single, stable DNS endpoint for clients but is not a service discovery mechanism—it does not maintain a registry of service names or expose a way for application code to query 'where is service X' to get a list of endpoints. In a microservices architecture, an internal ALB is typically used for load-balancing HTTP traffic to a service, but for service-to-service discovery you still need a registry like Cloud Map or a tool like Service Connect, because the ALB's DNS name is a proxy endpoint, not a dynamic list of individual service instances.

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