SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a microservices architecture on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate. The services need to communicate with each other using HTTP APIs. The company wants to minimize operational overhead and enable canary deployments. Which solution should the company use for service discovery and traffic routing?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse DNS-based routing (Route 53) or load balancer-level routing (ALB) with the application-layer traffic management needed for canary deployments, overlooking that only a service mesh like App Mesh provides the granular, proxy-based control required for HTTP traffic splitting without operational overhead.
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 App Mesh with Envoy sidecars
AWS App Mesh with Envoy sidecars provides a service mesh that handles service discovery, traffic routing, and canary deployments at the application layer. It integrates natively with ECS Fargate, offloading operational overhead by managing traffic splitting, retries, and observability without modifying application code. This makes it ideal for microservices requiring fine-grained control over HTTP traffic routing.
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 Amazon API Gateway with VPC Link
Why it's wrong here
API Gateway is for external APIs, not internal service-to-service communication.
- ✗
Use an Application Load Balancer with target groups per service
Why it's wrong here
ALB does not natively support canary deployments between services.
- ✗
Use Amazon Route 53 with weighted routing policies
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 is DNS-level, not suitable for fine-grained traffic splitting.
- ✓
Use AWS App Mesh with Envoy sidecars
Why this is correct
App Mesh provides traffic splitting and observability for canary deployments.
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