ANS-C01 Network Design Practice Question
A company is designing a network for a containerized microservices application running on Amazon ECS. The application consists of several microservices that need to communicate with each other. The company wants to use service discovery so that services can find each other by name. They also want to ensure that traffic between services is encrypted in transit. The microservices are deployed across multiple Availability Zones. Which combination of services should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse service discovery with load balancing or assume that a private hosted zone alone provides encryption, when in fact DNS-based discovery (Route 53) only resolves names and requires a separate mechanism like App Mesh or mTLS to encrypt traffic in transit.
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 AWS Cloud Map for service discovery and AWS App Mesh for encryption in transit
AWS Cloud Map provides service discovery by registering microservices with DNS names and health checks, allowing ECS tasks to resolve each other by name. AWS App Mesh uses Envoy sidecar proxies to enforce mutual TLS (mTLS) encryption between services, ensuring traffic is encrypted in transit without requiring changes to application code. This combination meets the requirements for name-based discovery and encrypted inter-service communication across multiple Availability Zones.
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 AWS Cloud Map for service discovery and AWS App Mesh for encryption in transit
Why this is correct
Cloud Map provides service discovery; App Mesh provides encryption.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer for each service and configure HTTPS listeners
Why it's wrong here
ALB is for external traffic, not for inter-service communication.
- ✗
Use VPC peering between each service's VPC
Why it's wrong here
Services are in the same VPC, so VPC peering is not needed.
- ✗
Use Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones for service discovery and enable encryption at the application layer
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 does not provide encryption.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ANS-C01 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 ANS-C01 exam.