DVA-C02 Troubleshooting and Optimization Practice Question
Which THREE factors should a developer consider when designing a stateless application on AWS? (Choose 3)
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
✓
Avoid storing data on the local file system of the instances
A stateless application should not store session state locally, so option A is correct. Session state should be stored in an external shared datastore like ElastiCache (option B) or a shared database like DynamoDB (option E). Storing state in instance memory (C) or using sticky sessions (D) would introduce statefulness, which is not desired in a stateless 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.
- ✓
Avoid storing data on the local file system of the instances
Why this is correct
A stateless application must not persist session or transactional data on an instance's local disk, because Auto Scaling can terminate or replace that instance at any time, and any data written only to its EBS root or instance store volume is permanently lost with it.
- ✓
Store session state in a shared external datastore like ElastiCache
Why this is correct
Moving session state to a shared, low-latency store such as ElastiCache for Redis decouples the user's session from any single compute node, so a load balancer can route each request to whichever healthy instance is available without breaking the user's experience.
- ✗
Store session state in the instance memory for low latency
Why it's wrong here
Keeping session data only in an instance's process memory ties that user permanently to one server; if the instance is scaled in, patched, or crashes, the in-memory session vanishes and the user is logged out or loses in-progress work, which defeats elasticity.
- ✗
Use sticky sessions on the load balancer to maintain session affinity
Why it's wrong here
Sticky sessions force the load balancer to pin a client to one specific backend instance, which reintroduces server-side state at the routing layer, prevents even traffic distribution across the fleet, and undermines the goal of a horizontally scalable stateless design.
- ✓
Use a shared database like Amazon DynamoDB for persistent data
Why this is correct
Persistent application data such as user records or orders belongs in a managed, shared datastore like DynamoDB rather than on any individual server, so every instance in the fleet reads and writes the same consistent data regardless of which one handles a given request.
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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.