SAP-C02 Design for New Solutions Practice Question
A company is migrating a legacy on-premises application to AWS. The application consists of a monolithic .NET application running on Windows Server, with a Microsoft SQL Server database. The company wants to improve scalability and reduce operational overhead. The application experiences variable traffic, with peaks during business hours. The company requires a highly available architecture with automatic failover for the database. Which migration strategy should a solutions architect recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is assuming that replatforming to Elastic Beanstalk or refactoring to microservices is necessary for scalability, but those add complexity and may not be needed for a lift-and-shift migration.
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
✓
Rehost the application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer, and migrate the database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ.
Rehosting the application on EC2 with an Auto Scaling group and ALB provides scalability and high availability without code changes. Migrating the database to RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ offers automatic failover and reduces management overhead. This strategy balances minimal changes with the desired scalability and availability, making it the most suitable for a legacy application.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Rehost the application on Amazon EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group behind an Application Load Balancer, and migrate the database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ.
Why this is correct
Rehosting on EC2 with an Auto Scaling group and ALB provides scalability and high availability for the application tier. Migrating to RDS for SQL Server with Multi-AZ ensures automatic failover and reduces database management overhead. This approach meets the requirements for scalability, high availability, and reduced operational effort with minimal application changes.
- ✗
Refactor the application into microservices running on Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate, and use Amazon Aurora for the database.
Why it's wrong here
Refactoring to microservices is a major undertaking that requires significant development effort and time. While Aurora provides high availability, it is not compatible with SQL Server, requiring database migration and code changes. This strategy does not align with the goal of reducing operational overhead quickly and may introduce unnecessary complexity.
- ✗
Retain the application on-premises and use AWS Storage Gateway for backup, and set up a VPN connection to AWS for disaster recovery.
Why it's wrong here
Retaining the application on-premises does not leverage AWS scalability or reduce operational overhead. It also fails to provide a highly available architecture with automatic failover for the database. This approach is more of a hybrid disaster recovery solution and does not meet the migration goals of improving scalability and reducing operational effort.
- ✗
Replatform the application to AWS Elastic Beanstalk for .NET, and use Amazon DynamoDB for the database.
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deployment but may require application modifications to work with the .NET platform. DynamoDB is a NoSQL database and would require significant schema and code changes, which is not ideal for a legacy SQL Server application. This approach increases migration complexity and does not provide automatic failover for a relational database.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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