SAP-C02 Design for New 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.

• ✗

  Traffic is distributed evenly across the two availability zones.

  Why it's wrong here

  Cross-zone load balancing distributes requests evenly across all registered targets, not across Availability Zones, so the two zones do not each receive half the traffic. It is tempting because zone-level balancing is the default behaviour when cross-zone load balancing is disabled.

• ✗

  Instances in us-east-1a receive 67% of traffic, us-east-1b receives 33%.

  Why it's wrong here

  Cross-zone load balancing equalises traffic per target, so each of the three instances receives one third regardless of zone. It is tempting because it describes the default distribution when cross-zone load balancing is disabled, where each node balances only within its own zone.

• ✓

  Each instance receives an equal share of traffic.

  Why this is correct

  With cross-zone load balancing enabled, the load balancer node in each Availability Zone distributes requests evenly to all registered targets in every enabled AZ, so each of the three instances receives an equal one-third share of traffic.

• ✗

  Traffic is sent to the instance with the least outstanding requests.

  Why it's wrong here

  Least-outstanding-requests is a load-balancing algorithm of Application Load Balancer's target groups, but the question asks how cross-zone distribution works, which is per-AZ round robin across registered targets. It would be tempting where latency-aware routing is needed, but ALB does not select targets by outstanding request count.