AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Practice Question

The correct option is to use Amazon EKS with a combination of self-managed EC2 nodes and AWS Fargate. This hybrid approach directly addresses all the specified requirements. Using Amazon EKS leverages the team's existing Kubernetes expertise, which reduces the learning curve and allows them to use familiar tooling. The stateful services with strict compliance needs can be deployed on self-managed EC2 nodes, which provide the necessary root-level access for installing custom agents and offer granular control over the underlying infrastructure. The stateless, spiky workloads are perfect candidates for AWS Fargate, which provides a serverless compute engine that automatically scales resources based on demand. This eliminates the operational overhead of managing servers and avoids the cost of over-provisioning for unpredictable traffic.

• Using Amazon ECS with a mix of EC2 and Fargate is a plausible but less optimal choice. While it offers a similar hybrid compute model, it does not leverage the team's existing and extensive Kubernetes experience, which would necessitate retraining and migrating their tooling to the ECS ecosystem.
• Using only self-managed EC2 nodes with Amazon EKS would meet the compliance and control requirements but would be less cost-effective and operationally efficient for the spiky workloads. This approach would require over-provisioning compute resources or implementing complex cluster auto-scaling logic to handle traffic bursts.
• Using only AWS Fargate with Amazon EKS is not suitable because it does not provide the required low-level host access needed to install specific agents for the stateful, compliance-heavy services. Fargate is a serverless model where the underlying host is fully managed by AWS and is not accessible to the user.