SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a global application that requires a highly available and low-latency API. The API will be consumed by clients across the world. The backend consists of an Application Load Balancer (ALB) in front of an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances in a single AWS Region. The company wants to improve performance for global users. Which solution meets these requirements with minimal operational overhead?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse CloudFront (a CDN optimized for cacheable content) with Global Accelerator (a network layer service for improving performance of non-cacheable, dynamic traffic), leading them to choose Option D without realizing that CloudFront adds latency for uncacheable API requests.
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
✓
Create an AWS Global Accelerator accelerator with the ALB as an endpoint.
AWS Global Accelerator uses the AWS global network to route user traffic to the optimal endpoint, reducing latency and improving availability. By using the ALB as an endpoint, it provides static anycast IP addresses and automatically reroutes traffic if the ALB becomes unhealthy, all with minimal operational overhead since it requires no changes to the application or additional infrastructure.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Deploy the application in multiple Regions and use Amazon Route 53 latency-based routing with active-passive failover.
Why it's wrong here
Multi-Region active-passive with Route 53 latency-based routing still serves all traffic from one Region until failover, so global users gain no latency improvement and a second Region doubles cost and operational effort. It is tempting because it is the standard pattern for regional disaster recovery, where surviving an outage matters rather than proximity.
- ✗
Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with Lambda@Edge to proxy requests to the ALB.
Why it's wrong here
Lambda@Edge adds per-request compute at edge locations but still forwards each request to the single-Region ALB, so it does not reduce origin latency and introduces function management overhead. It is tempting because it customises request and response handling at the edge, which is correct for header manipulation or auth logic, not for shortening origin distance.
- ✓
Create an AWS Global Accelerator accelerator with the ALB as an endpoint.
Why this is correct
AWS Global Accelerator routes client traffic over the AWS global network to the nearest edge location, then to the ALB endpoint, reducing latency for worldwide users. It requires no application changes and minimal operational overhead compared with multi-Region replication.
- ✗
Create an Amazon CloudFront distribution with the ALB as the origin.
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront caches content at edge locations, but the API's dynamic responses still traverse the origin path to a single-Region ALB, so origin latency for global clients is unchanged. It is tempting because it is the standard low-overhead acceleration for cacheable or static workloads, where edge caching genuinely removes origin round trips.
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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.