SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new microservices architecture using Amazon ECS with Fargate. The services need to communicate with each other using REST APIs. The company wants to implement a service mesh to handle traffic routing, observability, and security. Which AWS service should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse service discovery (Cloud Map) with a full service mesh, or assume that a load balancer (ELB) or API gateway can provide the same level of traffic routing, observability, and security for internal microservices 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 App Mesh.
AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking, enabling traffic routing, observability (metrics, logs, traces), and security (mTLS, authorization policies) for microservices. It integrates natively with Amazon ECS on Fargate, allowing sidecar Envoy proxies to handle inter-service communication without modifying application code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Elastic Load Balancing for internal network load balancers.
Why it's wrong here
Network load balancers distribute TCP traffic but provide no service mesh capabilities such as sidecar proxies, mTLS, or per-request routing. They suit layer 4 load balancing for ingress; AWS App Mesh is the service mesh offering for ECS tasks.
- ✓
AWS App Mesh.
Why this is correct
AWS App Mesh provides a managed Envoy-based service mesh that works with ECS on Fargate, delivering the traffic routing, observability and mutual TLS security the stem requires. It integrates natively with ECS service discovery, unlike ALB or Cloud Map alone, satisfying the REST API service-to-service communication constraint.
- ✗
AWS Cloud Map for service discovery.
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Map handles service discovery by maintaining a registry of task IPs and health, but supplies no traffic routing, mTLS, or observability telemetry. It complements a mesh; AWS App Mesh provides the actual service mesh layer for ECS.
- ✗
Amazon API Gateway with VPC linking.
Why it's wrong here
API Gateway terminates HTTP requests and cannot route arbitrary service-to-service traffic or provide a data-plane proxy for ECS tasks; it lacks sidecar injection, mTLS between services and mesh telemetry. It is tempting because it fronts REST APIs externally, which suits north-south ingress, not east-west service mesh communication.
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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.