SOA-C02 Networking and Content Delivery Practice Question
A company has multiple VPCs in the same AWS Region that need to communicate with each other. The SysOps administrator wants to avoid the complexity of a full mesh of VPC peering connections. Which AWS service should the administrator use to connect all VPCs with a central hub?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse VPC peering (which is point-to-point) with a hub-and-spoke solution, or mistakenly think AWS PrivateLink can route general traffic between VPCs, when it is actually designed for service-specific endpoints.
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
✓
AWS Transit Gateway
AWS Transit Gateway acts as a central hub that allows you to connect multiple VPCs and on-premises networks through a single gateway, eliminating the need for a full mesh of VPC peering connections. It uses a star topology where each VPC attaches to the Transit Gateway, and routing is managed via route tables, simplifying network management and 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.
- ✗
AWS Direct Connect
Why it's wrong here
AWS Direct Connect establishes a dedicated physical network link between your on-premises datacenter and AWS, allowing you to create private virtual interfaces for AWS services. However, Direct Connect does not act as a central hub for VPC-to-VPC traffic within a Region; even with a Direct Connect Gateway, it associates multiple VPCs but does not route traffic between them. Thus it cannot solve the need for multiple VPCs to communicate, making it incorrect.
- ✓
AWS Transit Gateway
Why this is correct
AWS Transit Gateway functions as a regional hub-and-spoke router, to which you can attach VPCs, VPN connections, and Direct Connect gateways. It uses central route tables to enable transitive routing, so any attached VPC can communicate with any other without point-to-point connections. This model scales easily with thousands of VPCs and simplifies network management and security. It directly solves the requirement of multiple VPCs needing to communicate, making it the correct choice.
- ✗
VPC peering
Why it's wrong here
VPC peering creates a direct, one-to-one network relationship between exactly two VPCs, using their private IP addresses. Because peering does not support transitive routing, connecting many VPCs requires a full mesh of N(N-1)/2 peering connections, each with its own route table entries. Additionally, overlapping CIDR blocks cannot be peered, which often complicates the design for multiple VPCs. This complexity makes VPC peering a poor solution for the described scenario.
- ✗
AWS PrivateLink
Why it's wrong here
AWS PrivateLink is designed for exposing individual services—such as a service running in your VPC—to other VPCs via interface VPC endpoints, without leaving the AWS network. It does not establish general, routable communication between arbitrary VPCs; rather, it grants access only to the specific endpoints you have defined. Since the question asks for interconnectivity among multiple VPCs in general, PrivateLink cannot fulfill that requirement and is therefore incorrect.
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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.