SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company has a legacy monolithic application running on a single EC2 instance. The application stores customer data in an attached EBS volume. The company wants to modernize the application to improve scalability and availability. Which approach should a solutions architect recommend?
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
✓
Refactor the application into microservices running on Amazon ECS with data stored in Amazon S3.
Migrating to a containerized, stateless application decouples storage and allows scaling. Option A is wrong because a larger instance still has a single point of failure. Option B is wrong because Multi-Attach EBS volumes have limited support and multiple instances writing to the same volume can cause data corruption. Option C is wrong because RDS is for databases, not for application data stored in files.
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 larger EC2 instance with enhanced networking.
Why it's wrong here
Vertical scaling leaves the single point of failure and the attached EBS volume intact, so availability does not improve. Larger instances suit short-term capacity relief for workloads that genuinely cannot be distributed, not modernisation requiring horizontal scaling.
- ✗
Configure multiple EC2 instances to share the same EBS volume using Multi-Attach.
Why it's wrong here
EBS Multi-Attach permits only clustered filesystems on io1/io2 volumes within one Availability Zone, so it cannot deliver multi-AZ availability or concurrent general-purpose access. It suits tightly coupled cluster failover, not a monolithic application needing horizontal scale.
- ✗
Replace the EBS volume with an Aurora RDS database.
Why it's wrong here
Replacing the EBS volume with Aurora RDS addresses only the data tier, leaving the monolithic application itself on a single EC2 instance, so compute remains a single point of failure and cannot scale horizontally. Aurora suits decoupling a database from application servers, but the stem requires modernising the application's scalability and availability.
- ✓
Refactor the application into microservices running on Amazon ECS with data stored in Amazon S3.
Why this is correct
Refactoring into microservices on Amazon ECS removes the single-instance bottleneck, enabling horizontal scaling and multi-AZ availability. Moving data to Amazon S3 decouples storage from compute, satisfying the scalability and availability constraints that the monolithic EBS-attached design cannot meet.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SAP-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 SAP-C02 exam.