SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is deploying a new microservices application on Amazon ECS using Fargate. The application consists of several services that need to communicate with each other. The company wants to use service discovery so that services can find each other by name. Additionally, the company needs to ensure that traffic between services is encrypted in transit. The security team requires that all inter-service traffic uses TLS. Which combination of services should be used to meet these requirements?
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 with TLS enforcement for inter-service communication.
AWS Cloud Map provides service discovery, allowing ECS services to find each other by name. AWS App Mesh can enforce TLS encryption for inter-service traffic, meeting the security requirement. Option A is incorrect because an Application Load Balancer is used for external traffic and does not provide service discovery for internal service-to-service communication. Option B is incorrect because ECS built-in service discovery (which relies on Cloud Map) does not automatically encrypt traffic; ACM certificates alone do not enforce TLS for all inter-service traffic. Option C is incorrect because an ALB is designed for load balancing external traffic, not for internal service discovery and mTLS.
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 an Application Load Balancer for inter-service communication with TLS termination.
Why it's wrong here
ALB is designed for external traffic, not for direct service-to-service communication; also adds latency.
- ✗
Use the built-in service discovery in Amazon ECS and encrypt traffic using AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) certificates.
Why it's wrong here
ECS built-in service discovery is limited; ACM does not automatically encrypt inter-service traffic.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer with target groups for each service and enable TLS on the load balancer.
Why it's wrong here
ALB does not provide service discovery; services would need to know the ALB endpoint.
- ✓
Use AWS Cloud Map for service discovery and AWS App Mesh with TLS enforcement for inter-service communication.
Why this is correct
Cloud Map provides DNS-based service discovery; App Mesh enables mTLS between services.
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JA
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.