SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new microservices architecture on AWS. They need a solution for service discovery that allows services to register themselves and discover other services dynamically. The solution must be highly available and integrated with AWS-native services. Which AWS service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse Amazon ECS Service Discovery (Option A) as a separate service, when it is actually a feature of AWS Cloud Map, leading them to overlook Cloud Map as the correct, standalone service for dynamic service discovery.
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 is a fully managed service discovery service that allows microservices to register themselves dynamically and discover other services via DNS or HTTP API calls. It integrates natively with AWS services like Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Lambda, and provides high availability through automatic health checking and resource synchronization across AWS Regions.
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 ECS Service Discovery
Why it's wrong here
ECS Service Discovery is built on AWS Cloud Map; Cloud Map is the recommended service for this use case.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer (ALB)
Why it's wrong here
ALB distributes traffic but does not provide service discovery for multiple service types.
- ✓
AWS Cloud Map
Why this is correct
Cloud Map is a service discovery service that allows resources to register and discover each other, with health checks.
- ✗
Amazon Route 53 private hosted zones
Why it's wrong here
Route 53 private hosted zones provide DNS resolution but not automatic service registration or health-based deregistration.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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