ANS-C01 Network Management and Operations Practice Question
A global e-commerce company is migrating to AWS and plans to use a hub-and-spoke topology with AWS Transit Gateway. The network team wants to ensure high availability for the connection between the hub VPC and the on-premises data center using AWS Direct Connect with multiple virtual interfaces (VIFs). They need to be able to fail over quickly with minimal packet loss. Which design should meet these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse multiple VIFs on a single connection with true redundancy, failing to recognize that physical diversity requires separate Direct Connect connections, not just separate logical interfaces.
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
✓
Provision two Direct Connect connections, each with multiple private VIFs, and attach them to the same transit gateway. Use BFD to detect failures and rely on ECMP routing across the VIFs.
It provides true high availability and fast failover by using two separate Direct Connect connections, each with multiple private VIFs, attached to the same transit gateway. BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection) enables sub-second failure detection, and ECMP (Equal-Cost Multi-Path) routing across the VIFs allows active-active load balancing, minimizing packet loss during failover. This design eliminates single points of failure and meets the requirement for rapid convergence with minimal disruption.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Provision one Direct Connect connection with a single private VIF, and enable BFD on the VIF to detect failures quickly.
Why it's wrong here
A single VIF is a single point of failure; BFD only helps detect failures but does not provide redundancy.
- ✗
Provision one Direct Connect connection with two private VIFs, and use a second Direct Connect connection as backup with a single VIF. Configure route tables to prefer the primary.
Why it's wrong here
This design still has a single point of failure at the primary Direct Connect location and does not provide active-active load balancing.
- ✓
Provision two Direct Connect connections, each with multiple private VIFs, and attach them to the same transit gateway. Use BFD to detect failures and rely on ECMP routing across the VIFs.
Why this is correct
This provides active-active connectivity with fast failover via BFD, and ECMP allows load balancing across VIFs.
- ✗
Provision two Direct Connect connections, each with a single private VIF, and use AWS Site-to-Site VPN as a backup for each.
Why it's wrong here
While having two connections is good, using a single VIF per connection does not leverage ECMP, and VPN backup may have slower failover.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This ANS-C01 question is part of Courseiva's 1,621-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.