DOP-C02 Resilient Cloud Solutions 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.

• ✗

  It replaces the need for an Application Load Balancer.

  Why it's wrong here

  Global Accelerator does not replace an Application Load Balancer; it operates in front of it. The ALB remains the regional endpoint that forwards requests to EC2 instances or containers, while Global Accelerator only provides anycast edge IPs, health checks, and traffic steering to that ALB. Removing the ALB would eliminate critical Layer 7 features such as path-based routing, host-based routing, and HTTP header modifications, so the two services are complementary, not substitutable.

• ✓

  It provides static IP addresses and automatically routes traffic to the closest healthy ALB, improving availability and performance.

  Why this is correct

  Global Accelerator uses two static Anycast IP addresses at AWS edge locations, which are announced from multiple points of presence. It monitors the health of your ALB or NLB endpoints and automatically routes each user's traffic to the closest endpoint that is healthy, using the AWS backbone instead of the public internet. This improves availability by failing over to a healthy endpoint within seconds and improves performance by reducing latency and jitter, but it still depends on the ALB to handle the actual HTTP/HTTPS load balancing.

• ✗

  It provides DNS-based failover between Regions.

  Why it's wrong here

  DNS-based failover is a Route 53 feature, not a Global Accelerator capability. Route 53 uses DNS resolution to return different IPs based on health checks and latency, which can be slow to propagate due to TTL caches. Global Accelerator instead uses anycast routing and continuous health checks at the network layer, so traffic is instantly shifted away from an unhealthy endpoint at the edge, without waiting for DNS TTLs or relying on recursive resolvers.

• ✗

  It caches static content at AWS edge locations.

  Why it's wrong here

  Caching static content is the role of Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network that caches objects at edge locations to reduce origin load and improve latency for repeat requests. Global Accelerator does not cache anything; it simply forwards network packets through AWS edge locations to the origin ALB or NLB. While both use AWS edge infrastructure, Global Accelerator is focused on TCP/UDP traffic acceleration and failover, not on serving cached HTTP responses.

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