SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is designing a new web application on AWS. The application must be highly available and scale automatically based on traffic. The architecture includes an Application Load Balancer (ALB) and an Auto Scaling group of EC2 instances. The application stores session state. What is the BEST way to handle session state to ensure high availability?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently choose DynamoDB (Option A) because it is a managed, highly available database, but they overlook the latency and cost implications for session state, which is a classic in-memory caching use case where ElastiCache for Redis is the optimal AWS service.
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
✓
Store session state in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is the best choice for handling session state in a highly available, auto-scaling web application because it provides a centralized, in-memory data store that is external to the EC2 instances. This ensures that session data persists independently of instance lifecycle events (e.g., scaling in/out or failures), and Redis offers sub-millisecond latency, replication, and automatic failover, which are critical for maintaining session continuity across the fleet.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Store session state in Amazon DynamoDB
Why it's wrong here
DynamoDB is a database, not optimized for session state.
- ✗
Store session state on the local instance store of each EC2 instance
Why it's wrong here
Instance store is ephemeral and not shared.
- ✗
Store session state in Amazon S3
Why it's wrong here
S3 is object storage, not suitable for session state.
- ✓
Store session state in Amazon ElastiCache for Redis
Why this is correct
ElastiCache provides a centralized, highly available session store.
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