SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a containerized microservices architecture on Amazon ECS. The services must be able to discover each other using DNS names. Which AWS service should the company use for service discovery?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse a load balancer (ELB) with service discovery; candidates often think ELB provides DNS-based discovery, but it only routes traffic to a group of targets, not per-instance DNS names for dynamic microservice-to-microservice communication.
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
✓
AWS Cloud Map
AWS Cloud Map is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed service discovery solution that integrates natively with Amazon ECS. It allows microservices to register their DNS names and health checks, enabling other services to discover them via DNS queries or API calls. This directly supports the requirement for containerized services to find each other using DNS names within an ECS cluster.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
Cloud Map provides DNS-based service discovery for microservices.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53 Resolver
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 Resolver is for hybrid DNS resolution, not service discovery.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
Why it's wrong here
ELB distributes traffic but does not provide DNS-based service discovery.
- ✗
Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
Why it's wrong here
ECR is a container image registry, not for service discovery.
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Same concept, more angles
1 more way this is tested on SAP-C02
These questions test the same concept from different angles. Work through them to make sure you can recognise it however the exam phrases it.
Variation 1. A company is designing a new microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate with each other securely. The company wants to use service discovery so that services can find each other using DNS names. Which AWS service should the company use?
medium- A.AWS PrivateLink with VPC endpoint services.
- B.Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones with DNS records for each service.
- ✓ C.AWS Cloud Map with namespaces and service instances.
- D.Elastic Load Balancing with internal load balancers for each service.
Why C: AWS Cloud Map is the correct choice because it is a cloud resource discovery service specifically designed for microservices architectures. It allows you to define custom namespaces (public, private DNS, or API-based) and register service instances with health checks. Services running on ECS with Fargate can then discover each other via DNS queries or API calls, enabling dynamic and secure communication without managing static IPs or load balancers.
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.