SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
A company has deployed a web application behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) across multiple Availability Zones. Users in some regions report slow page load times. Which action should the SysOps Administrator take to improve performance for all users?
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 AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic over the AWS global network.
AWS Global Accelerator improves performance by directing traffic over the AWS global network and using edge locations close to users, reducing latency for all users. Option A is correct because it optimizes the path from users to the application. Option B is incorrect because increasing ALB capacity only helps with handling more requests, not latency for geographically distant users. Option C is incorrect because CloudFront is primarily for caching static content, and the application serves dynamic content that may not be cacheable. Option D is incorrect because moving to a single Availability Zone reduces fault tolerance and does not address latency for users far from that zone.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use AWS Global Accelerator to route traffic over the AWS global network.
Why this is correct
AWS Global Accelerator assigns two static anycast IP addresses at AWS edge locations and directs traffic onto the AWS global backbone, bypassing congested public internet segments. This reduces the number of intermediate hops and round-trip latency for users worldwide, while also providing automatic failover across healthy ALB endpoints. It is specifically designed for TCP/UDP workloads where each request requires low and stable latency, unlike caching services that only speed up repeated content.
- ✗
Increase the ALB capacity by adding more target instances.
Why it's wrong here
Adding more target instances to the ALB increases the backend's aggregate throughput and connection capacity, but it does nothing to shorten the network path between a geographically distant client and the regional ALB endpoint. The dominant latency factor for far-away users is propagation delay and the internet routing path, not backend saturation; therefore scaling out cannot meaningfully reduce response times for a globally distributed audience.
- ✗
Enable Amazon CloudFront to cache dynamic content.
Why it's wrong here
CloudFront primarily accelerates static and cacheable content by serving copies from edge locations. Dynamic content, such as personalized web application responses, is still forwarded to the origin ALB for each request unless it is explicitly cached with careful TTLs and invalidation rules, and caching dynamic data risks serving stale or incorrect responses. Even when CloudFront routes dynamic requests to origin, it uses the AWS backbone, but the marginal latency improvement is less predictable than Global Accelerator's optimized traffic entry at the closest edge POP.
- ✗
Move the application to a single Availability Zone to reduce network hops.
Why it's wrong here
Consolidating the application into a single Availability Zone reduces infrastructure redundancy and creates a single point of failure, which violates high availability best practices. It also does not meaningfully reduce the internet hops for distant customers, because the AZ selection occurs only inside the region after traffic has already traversed the public internet; availability zones within a region are physically close with minimal inter-AZ latency, so this change has negligible impact on end-user response times.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SOA-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 SOA-C02 exam.