AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 293

A solutions architect is designing the architecture of a new application being deployed to the AWS Cloud. The application will run on Amazon EC2 On-Demand
Instances and will automatically scale across multiple Availability Zones. The EC2 instances will scale up and down frequently throughout the day. An Application
Load Balancer (ALB) will handle the load distribution. The architecture needs to support distributed session data management. The company is willing to make changes to code if needed.
What should the solutions architect do to ensure that the architecture supports distributed session data management?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon ElastiCache to manage and store session data.
• B. Use session affinity (sticky sessions) of the ALB to manage session data.
• C. Use Session Manager from AWS Systems Manager to manage the session.
• D. Use the GetSessionToken API operation in AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to manage the session.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon ElastiCache provides a high-performance, in-memory distributed key-value store that is ideal for offloading and sharing session state across auto-scaling EC2 instances. While ALB sticky sessions can bind a user to an instance, they do not support true distributed session management and will result in lost sessions if instances terminate. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager is used for secure shell access to instances, and AWS STS GetSessionToken is for temporary AWS credentials, making neither suitable for application session state.