SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a microservices architecture using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate with each other. The company wants to implement service discovery and load balancing at the application layer. Which TWO services should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Network Load Balancer (NLB) as an application-layer solution because it can handle TLS termination, but it operates at Layer 4 and lacks the HTTP-aware routing required for application-layer 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 correct because it provides service discovery for microservices by allowing services to register their DNS names and health checks, enabling dynamic routing between ECS Fargate tasks. Application Load Balancer (ALB) is correct because it operates at Layer 7 (application layer), supporting HTTP/HTTPS traffic, path-based routing, and integration with ECS for load balancing across Fargate tasks.
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 API Gateway
Why it's wrong here
API Gateway is for creating REST APIs, not internal service discovery.
- ✗
Network Load Balancer (NLB)
Why it's wrong here
NLB operates at layer 4, not application layer.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
Cloud Map provides service discovery for dynamic resources.
- ✓
Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Why this is correct
ALB provides application-layer load balancing and routing.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 is a DNS service, not for service discovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This SAP-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 1,660-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
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.