DVA-C02 Development with AWS Services Practice Question
A developer is designing a microservices architecture where each service runs in its own Amazon ECS container. Services need to communicate with each other. The developer wants to simplify service discovery and load balancing. Which AWS service should the developer use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse the ECS service discovery feature (which is just a configuration option) with a standalone AWS service, leading them to pick option C instead of recognizing that AWS Cloud Map is the underlying service that actually provides the discovery mechanism.
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 provides a fully managed service discovery solution that allows microservices to dynamically discover each other using DNS or HTTP API calls. It integrates natively with Amazon ECS, enabling services to register themselves and resolve other services by logical names, which simplifies service discovery and load balancing across containers.
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 provides a robust service discovery solution by registering dynamically changing microservices with custom names, allowing other services to discover them via API calls or DNS queries. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon ECS, enabling tasks to register and deregister automatically as they scale or become unhealthy. This dynamic registration is crucial for ephemeral microservices, ensuring services can find each other reliably without hardcoding network locations.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances or containers, to enhance availability and fault tolerance. While essential for distributing requests to *known* healthy instances, ELB itself does not provide a mechanism for services to *discover* the network locations of other services dynamically. It relies on a pre-configured target group, which doesn't solve the problem of a service finding another service whose IP address might change frequently.
- ✗
Amazon ECS service discovery
Why it's wrong here
Amazon ECS (Elastic Container Service) is a container orchestration service that manages the deployment and scaling of containers. While ECS facilitates running microservices, it does not inherently provide a native, built-in service discovery mechanism for these services to locate each other dynamically. Instead, ECS integrates directly with AWS Cloud Map to offer a robust service discovery solution, meaning "ECS service discovery" as a standalone concept is not accurate without Cloud Map providing the underlying functionality.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53
Why it's wrong here
Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service primarily used for routing internet traffic to resources. While it can resolve DNS queries, using Route 53 alone for dynamic service discovery in a microservices architecture would necessitate manual or custom scripting to update DNS records every time a service instance scales up, scales down, or changes its IP address. This approach lacks the automation and dynamic registration capabilities required for ephemeral containerized services.
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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.