AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) — Question 714

A company wants to deploy its containerized application workloads to a VPC across three Availability Zones. The company needs a solution that is highly available across Availability Zones. The solution must require minimal changes to the application.

Which solution will meet these requirements with the LEAST operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Configure Amazon ECS Service Auto Scaling to use target tracking scaling. Set the minimum capacity to 3. Set the task placement strategy type to spread with an Availability Zone attribute.
• B. Use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) self-managed nodes. Configure Application Auto Scaling to use target tracking scaling. Set the minimum capacity to 3.
• C. Use Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Launch three EC2 instances in a spread placement group. Configure an Auto Scaling group to use target tracking scaling. Set the minimum capacity to 3.
• D. Use an AWS Lambda function. Configure the Lambda function to connect to a VPC. Configure Application Auto Scaling to use Lambda as a scalable target. Set the minimum capacity to 3.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Amazon ECS is a managed container orchestration service that significantly reduces operational overhead compared to managing EC2 instances or self-managed Kubernetes nodes. Configuring a task placement strategy with a spread attribute across Availability Zones ensures high availability, while using ECS requires no changes to the containerized application. In contrast, EKS self-managed nodes and EC2 instances require substantial maintenance overhead, and migrating a containerized application to AWS Lambda would require significant code modifications.