SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new microservices application using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate securely within the VPC. Which approach should be used for service discovery?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse DNS-based resolution (Route 53 private hosted zones) with dynamic service discovery (AWS Cloud Map), assuming that static DNS records with health checks are sufficient for microservices that scale and change IPs frequently.
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 and Fargate. It allows microservices to register themselves with DNS-based or API-based service endpoints, enabling dynamic, secure communication within the VPC without requiring manual IP management or external DNS configuration.
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 Route 53 private hosted zones with health checks
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 private hosted zones resolve DNS names, but ECS task IP addresses change on every deployment, and health checks alone do not register those ephemeral addresses. It suits static-record private DNS, not dynamic Fargate task registration, which AWS Cloud Map handles.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
AWS Cloud Map provides service discovery with health-checked registration of ECS tasks, returning IP addresses and ports through DNS or API calls. This suits Fargate tasks, whose addresses change, and keeps service-to-service traffic inside the VPC.
- ✗
VPC peering connections between services
Why it's wrong here
VPC peering links two VPC networks at the routing layer; it does not register or resolve individual ECS task endpoints, and all services here already share one VPC. It is tempting because peering enables private cross-VPC connectivity, which is its actual purpose.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer with path-based routing
Why it's wrong here
An ALB distributes HTTP traffic by path or host; it provides no registry mapping logical service names to task IP addresses, so Fargate tasks cannot resolve peers. It is tempting because ALBs do front microservices, but that is ingress load balancing, not service discovery.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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