SAP-C02 Continuous Improvement for Existing Solutions Practice Question
A company is migrating a legacy monolithic application to AWS. They plan to use Amazon ECS with Fargate for containerized microservices. The application requires sticky sessions and SSL termination. What should the company use to meet these requirements?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many assume that only ALB can provide sticky sessions and SSL termination. However, NLB supports both: TLS termination at the listener and target group stickiness via source IP. NLB is often the better choice for performance-sensitive workloads.
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
✓
Network Load Balancer (NLB) with target group stickiness.
Network Load Balancer (NLB) supports TLS termination at the listener level and provides sticky sessions through target group stickiness (source IP affinity). This meets the requirements for containerized microservices on Amazon ECS with Fargate. Application Load Balancer (ALB) also supports sticky sessions and SSL termination, but NLB is more cost-effective for high-throughput scenarios and works well with Fargate. Options C and D are incorrect because Classic Load Balancer is legacy and lacks advanced features, while AWS Lambda with API Gateway is not a load balancer and cannot directly provide sticky sessions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Network Load Balancer (NLB) with target group stickiness.
Why this is correct
NLB supports TLS termination and sticky sessions via target group stickiness (source IP affinity). This makes it a valid option for the requirements.
- ✗
Application Load Balancer (ALB) with stickiness and SSL termination.
Why it's wrong here
ALB also supports sticky sessions and SSL termination, but it is not the only option. The question asks for what should be used, and NLB is equally suitable.
- ✗
Classic Load Balancer (CLB) with SSL termination at the instance.
Why it's wrong here
Classic Load Balancer supports SSL termination at the instance, but it lacks advanced routing features and is legacy. It is not recommended for microservices.
- ✗
AWS Lambda with API Gateway.
Why it's wrong here
AWS Lambda with API Gateway is not a load balancer and cannot provide sticky sessions or SSL termination for containerized services directly.
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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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.