← DOP-C02·Amazon Web Services

Question 315 of 1,750

Resilient Cloud Solutions →hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped

ECS Task Placement Strategy for Availability Zone Resilience

This DOP-C02 practice question tests your understanding of resilient cloud solutions. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.

A company runs a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Each service is deployed in its own ECS service. The company wants to ensure that if one Availability Zone (AZ) fails, the services can continue to operate with minimal impact. What is the MOST resilient task placement strategy?

A
Use a task placement constraint to run tasks on distinct instances.
Why wrong: Distinct instance is for EC2 launch type, not Fargate.
B
Use a task placement strategy that uses the random algorithm.
Why wrong: Random distribution may not ensure even spread across AZs.
C
Use a task placement strategy that uses the binpack algorithm to maximize resource utilization.
Why wrong: Binpack does not consider AZ distribution.
D
Use a task placement strategy that spreads tasks across Availability Zones.
Spreading across AZs ensures high availability even if one AZ fails.

Full breakdown with real-world context →

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

✓

Use a task placement strategy that spreads tasks across Availability Zones.

Option D is correct because the 'spread across Availability Zones' strategy explicitly distributes ECS tasks across multiple AZs, ensuring that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZs continue to run the service. This is the most resilient approach for Fargate tasks, as it leverages the AZ isolation provided by AWS to minimize the blast radius of a single-AZ failure.

Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

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

✗
Use a task placement constraint to run tasks on distinct instances.
Why it's wrong here
Distinct instance is for EC2 launch type, not Fargate.
✗
Use a task placement strategy that uses the random algorithm.
Why it's wrong here
Random distribution may not ensure even spread across AZs.
✗
Use a task placement strategy that uses the binpack algorithm to maximize resource utilization.
Why it's wrong here
Binpack does not consider AZ distribution.
✓
Use a task placement strategy that spreads tasks across Availability Zones.
Why this is correct
Spreading across AZs ensures high availability even if one AZ fails.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

Common exam traps

Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword

The trap here is that candidates often confuse 'high availability' with 'resource efficiency' and choose binpack (Option C) because it reduces cost, but the question explicitly asks for resilience, not cost optimization.

Detailed technical explanation

How to think about this question

Under the hood, the 'spread' strategy uses the 'spreadAcross' parameter with the 'attribute:ecs.availability-zone' field, which instructs the ECS scheduler to place tasks evenly across AZs before considering other placement constraints. In a real-world scenario, if you have 6 tasks and 3 AZs, the scheduler will place 2 tasks per AZ, ensuring that a single-AZ failure only affects 33% of the service's capacity, while the remaining tasks continue to handle traffic.

KKey Concepts to Remember

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.

TExam Day Tips

Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.

Key takeaway

Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.

Real-world example

How this comes up in practice

An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.

Quick reference

AAA Protocol Comparison

Protocol	Port(s)	Encryption	Transport	Primary Use
RADIUS	1812 / 1813	Password only	UDP	Network access control
TACACS+	49	Full packet	TCP	Device administration
Diameter	3868	Full session	TCP / SCTP	Carrier / mobile networks
802.1X	—	EAP-based	Layer 2	Port-based access control

TACACS+ encrypts the entire packet; RADIUS only encrypts the password field — a key exam distinction.

What to study next

Got this wrong? Here's your next step.

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FAQ

Questions learners often ask

What does this DOP-C02 question test?

Resilient Cloud Solutions — This question tests Resilient Cloud Solutions — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..

What is the correct answer to this question?

The correct answer is: Use a task placement strategy that spreads tasks across Availability Zones. — Option D is correct because the 'spread across Availability Zones' strategy explicitly distributes ECS tasks across multiple AZs, ensuring that if one AZ fails, the remaining AZs continue to run the service. This is the most resilient approach for Fargate tasks, as it leverages the AZ isolation provided by AWS to minimize the blast radius of a single-AZ failure.

What should I do if I get this DOP-C02 question wrong?

Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.

What is the key concept behind this question?

Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.

About these practice questions

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Same concept, more angles

1 more ways this is tested on DOP-C02

These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.

Variation 1. A company's application runs on Amazon ECS with Fargate launch type. The application must be resilient to an Availability Zone failure. Which configuration should be used?

medium

✓ A.Create an ECS service with tasks distributed across multiple Availability Zones using a spread placement strategy
B.Use an ECS cluster with a cluster placement strategy that prefers the same Availability Zone
C.Define multiple task definitions, one for each Availability Zone
D.Use an ECS service with a single task in one Availability Zone and rely on auto-scaling

Why A: Option A is correct because ECS services using the Fargate launch type can distribute tasks across multiple Availability Zones (AZs) by defining a spread placement strategy with the 'availabilityZone' dimension. This ensures that if one AZ fails, the tasks in the other AZs continue to serve traffic, providing resilience to an AZ failure. The spread strategy explicitly instructs ECS to place tasks evenly across AZs, which is essential for high availability.

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