SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. Each service must be independently deployable and scale based on demand. The company wants to minimize operational overhead for container orchestration. Which AWS service should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to choose Amazon EKS assuming Kubernetes is the only modern orchestration tool, but the question specifically asks for minimal operational overhead, and Fargate's serverless model removes the need to manage any cluster infrastructure, which EKS does not fully eliminate even with managed node groups.
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
✓
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate
Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate is the correct choice because it provides a fully managed container orchestration service that eliminates the need to provision, configure, or scale underlying EC2 instances. Fargate runs each container in its own isolated compute environment, allowing each microservice to scale independently based on demand while minimizing operational overhead for cluster management.
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 Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Why it's wrong here
EKS delivers managed Kubernetes control planes but leaves node provisioning, patching and cluster upgrades to the operator, so it does not minimise orchestration overhead here. It tempts teams needing portable Kubernetes APIs or existing Helm charts, where workload portability across clouds outweighs operational burden.
- ✗
Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EC2 with Auto Scaling requires the company to manage instances, patching, cluster placement and scaling policies itself, so it does not minimise container-orchestration overhead. It is tempting because Auto Scaling handles demand-based capacity, and would be correct for workloads needing full host-level control rather than managed orchestration.
- ✓
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate
Why this is correct
Fargate removes the need to provision or manage EC2 instances for the cluster, so each task runs serverlessly while ECS still provides independent deployment and demand-based scaling per service. This directly satisfies the stem's constraint of minimising container orchestration operational overhead.
- ✗
AWS Lambda
Why it's wrong here
Lambda runs event-driven functions, not long-running containerised services, so it cannot host independently deployable microservice containers. It appeals because it removes server management entirely, and would be right for short, stateless, event-triggered tasks rather than a container orchestration requirement.
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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.