AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C02) — Question 306

A company is building its web application using containers on AWS. The company requires three instances of the web application to run at all times. The application must be able to scale to meet increases in demand. Management is extremely sensitive to cost but agrees that the application should be highly available.
What should a solutions architect recommend?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster using the Fargate launch type. Create a task definition for the web application. Create an ECS service with a desired count of three tasks.
• B. Create an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster using the Amazon EC2 launch type with three container instances in one Availability Zone. Create a task definition for the web application. Place one task for each container instance.
• C. Create an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster using the Fargate launch type with one container instance in three different Availability Zones. Create a task definition for the web application. Create an ECS service with a desired count of three tasks.
• D. Create an Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) cluster using the Amazon EC2 launch type with one container instance in two different Availability Zones. Create a task definition for the web application. Place two tasks on one container instance and one task on the remaining container instance.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is correct because AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that eliminates the operational overhead of managing EC2 instances, while automatically distributing tasks across multiple Availability Zones to ensure high availability. Option B fails to provide high availability by placing all instances in a single Availability Zone. Options C and D are incorrect because Fargate does not require the user to manage or specify 'container instances', and utilizing manual EC2 instances increases operational complexity and cost compared to a serverless Fargate approach.