SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is deploying a containerized application on Amazon ECS. The application must be highly available and scale automatically based on CPU utilization. The application also needs to be accessible from the internet via a single endpoint. Which combination of services should the solutions architect use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse step scaling with target tracking, assuming step scaling is required for CPU-based scaling, but target tracking is the simpler and more AWS-recommended approach for maintaining a specific utilization target.
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
✓
Amazon ECS with an Application Load Balancer and ECS Service Auto Scaling with a target tracking policy based on average CPU utilization.
An Application Load Balancer (ALB) provides a single internet-facing endpoint and supports HTTP/HTTPS traffic, which is typical for containerized applications. ECS Service Auto Scaling with a target tracking policy based on average CPU utilization allows the service to automatically adjust the desired count of tasks to maintain a specified CPU utilization target, ensuring high availability and elasticity.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Amazon ECS with an Application Load Balancer and ECS Service Auto Scaling with a target tracking policy based on average CPU utilization.
Why this is correct
ALB provides a single endpoint; target tracking auto scaling adjusts capacity based on CPU.
- ✗
Amazon ECS with a Network Load Balancer and step scaling policies.
Why it's wrong here
NLB is not ideal for HTTP/HTTPS traffic; step scaling is not as responsive as target tracking.
- ✗
Amazon ECS with an Application Load Balancer and step scaling policies based on CPU utilization.
Why it's wrong here
This option is tempting as it correctly identifies Amazon ECS for container deployment, an Application Load Balancer for a single internet endpoint, and step scaling policies for automatic CPU-based scaling. However, for robust high availability and seamless scaling of ECS tasks, particularly in a serverless context, AWS Fargate is typically preferred as the compute engine. Fargate abstracts away server management, automatically distributing and managing tasks across Availability Zones, which is crucial for achieving true high availability without manual EC2 instance management.
- ✗
Amazon ECS with an Application Load Balancer and manual scaling.
Why it's wrong here
Manual scaling does not provide automatic scaling.
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