SAP-C02 Practice Question: Accelerate Workload Migration and Modernization
A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to AWS. The application has a stateful session layer that uses local disk storage. The migration plan involves rehosting the application on Amazon EC2 instances. What architecture change should the company implement to ensure high availability and stateless application tiers?
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
✓
Use Amazon ElastiCache for session state management.
ElastiCache provides a low-latency, highly available, and scalable in-memory cache that can store session state independently from EC2 instances. This decouples state from compute, enabling stateless application tiers that can be auto-scaled and replaced without losing session data. Option A (S3 Transfer Acceleration) is not suitable for frequent, low-latency session reads/writes. Option B (RDS Multi-AZ) is designed for relational databases, not session caching, and would introduce unnecessary overhead. Option D (EBS volumes) ties state to specific instances, preventing high availability and auto-scaling.
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 data in Amazon S3 with Transfer Acceleration.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon S3 is not designed for low-latency session state storage.
- ✗
Use Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ to store session data.
Why it's wrong here
Amazon RDS is for relational data, not optimized for high-frequency session reads/writes.
- ✓
Use Amazon ElastiCache for session state management.
Why this is correct
Amazon ElastiCache provides low-latency session caching, enabling stateless EC2 instances.
- ✗
Attach Amazon EBS volumes to each EC2 instance for session persistence.
Why it's wrong here
EBS volumes tie state to individual instances, preventing statelessness.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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