DOP-C02 Timed Practice Test 3 — 10 Questions

Question 1

The exhibit shows a CloudFormation stack event. The stack creation failed with 'Resource creation cancelled'. What is the most likely reason for this cancellation?

Accepted Answer

The stack was manually cancelled by a user or an automation script.. The 'Resource creation cancelled' event in a CloudFormation stack creation indicates that the operation was explicitly halted by a user or an automation script (e.g., via the AWS CLI, Console, or SDK). This is distinct from a timeout or permission error, which would produce different error messages such as 'Resource creation timed out' or 'API: cloudformation:CreateStack Access Denied'.

Answer

The stack template contains a syntax error.

Answer

The IAM role used for stack operations lacks permissions.

Answer

A stack creation timeout was reached.

Question 2

A company runs a critical batch processing workload on Amazon EMR that must complete within a 2-hour window each night. The workload is fault-tolerant but must be resilient to instance failures. Currently, the EMR cluster uses instance fleets with Spot Instances. Recently, Spot Instance interruptions caused the cluster to take over 3 hours to complete. Which change will MOST effectively ensure the workload completes within the 2-hour window despite Spot interruptions?

Accepted Answer

Use a mixed instances policy that includes multiple instance types across different Availability Zones.. A mixed instances policy across multiple Availability Zones increases the diversity of Spot capacity pools. When one instance type or zone experiences interruptions, the cluster can fall back to other pools, reducing the likelihood of prolonged delays. This approach directly addresses Spot interruption risk without sacrificing cost efficiency, as On-Demand instances would.

Answer

Increase the number of core nodes to 20 to improve parallelism.

Answer

Switch to using On-Demand instances for all nodes.

Answer

Configure the cluster to terminate idle nodes after 5 minutes to reduce costs.

Question 3

Match each AWS Config rule to its purpose.

Accepted Answer

s3-bucket-public-read-prohibited: Checks if S3 buckets allow public read access. The correct matches are: s3-bucket-public-read-prohibited with S3 public read check, restricted-ssh with SSH access check, iam-user-no-policies-check with no attached policies, and cloud-trail-cloud-watch-logs-enabled with CloudWatch integration. Common confusions include swapping definitions between different rule types.

Answer

s3-bucket-public-read-prohibited: Checks security groups for unrestricted SSH access

Answer

encrypted-volumes: Checks that no IAM users have inline policies

Question 4

A DevOps engineer is troubleshooting an Auto Scaling group (ASG) that is not launching instances as expected. The ASG is configured with a launch template that uses an Amazon Linux 2 AMI. The engineer checks the EC2 Auto Scaling console and sees that the group's desired capacity is set to 2, but only 1 instance is running. The last scaling activity shows 'Failed to launch instance. Error: Your quota allows for 0 more running instance(s).' What is the most likely cause?

Accepted Answer

The account has reached the EC2 instance limit for the selected instance type in the region.. The error message 'Your quota allows for 0 more running instance(s)' directly indicates that the AWS account has reached its EC2 instance limit for the specific instance type in the region. Auto Scaling groups cannot launch instances beyond the service quota, regardless of the desired capacity. This is a common issue when the default limit (e.g., 5 or 20 instances per instance family) has been exhausted.

Answer

The launch template has insufficient IAM permissions to create instances.

Answer

The VPC subnet does not have enough available IP addresses.

Answer

There is an instance that is not passing health checks, preventing new instances.

Question 5

A company has a Lambda function that processes sensitive data and needs to access an RDS database. The security team requires that the database credentials are automatically rotated every 30 days. Which service should be used to store and rotate the credentials?

Accepted Answer

AWS Secrets Manager. AWS Secrets Manager is the correct choice because it is specifically designed to securely store, manage, and automatically rotate database credentials for services like RDS. It supports native, built-in rotation for Amazon RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and MariaDB) without requiring custom Lambda functions. The automatic rotation can be scheduled at a desired interval (e.g., every 30 days) using a rotation schedule defined in the secret's configuration, and it integrates directly with RDS to update the credentials on both the secret and the database.

Answer

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

Answer

Amazon DynamoDB

Answer

AWS IAM roles

Question 6

Which THREE actions should a DevOps engineer take to ensure that AWS CloudFormation stacks are securely managed? (Choose three.)

Accepted Answer

Use a service role with least privilege when creating the stack.. Using a service role with least privilege ensures that CloudFormation operates with only the permissions necessary to create, update, and delete resources, rather than inheriting the user's broader permissions. This decouples the user's IAM permissions from the stack's runtime actions, reducing the risk of privilege escalation and unintended resource modifications.

Answer

Set a DeletionPolicy on the stack to retain resources when the stack is deleted.

Answer

Define a StackSetPolicy to control permissions across accounts.

Question 7

A company is implementing a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline to deploy a serverless application using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM). The pipeline must build and package the application, then deploy it to multiple environments (dev, test, prod) sequentially with manual approval gates before production. Which stage configuration should be used?

Accepted Answer

Use a CodeBuild build stage to run 'sam package' and 'sam deploy' commands, then separate deploy stages for each environment with manual approval actions. It uses a CodeBuild build stage to run 'sam package' and 'sam deploy' commands, which is the recommended approach for SAM-based deployments. The pipeline then separates deploy stages for each environment (dev, test, prod) with manual approval actions before production, satisfying the sequential deployment and manual gate requirements.

Answer

Use a single CloudFormation stack with a change set approval step

Answer

Configure CodePipeline with a deploy action provider set to AWS CloudFormation

Answer

Use CodeDeploy to deploy the SAM template directly to Lambda

Question 8

Which TWO metrics should be monitored in Amazon CloudWatch to detect a potential memory leak in an EC2 instance? (Choose two.)

Accepted Answer

MemoryUtilization (custom metric published via CloudWatch Agent).. MemoryUtilization is a custom metric that must be published via the CloudWatch Agent because EC2 does not expose memory metrics by default. Monitoring this metric over time can reveal a steady upward trend in memory usage that does not drop after processes complete, which is a classic symptom of a memory leak.

Answer

DiskReadOps

Answer

NetworkIn

Answer

CPUUtilization

Question 9

A company uses AWS CodeBuild to run unit tests and package a Java application. The build environment needs to have a specific version of Java installed that is not available in the standard build images. The team wants to minimize build time. How should the engineer configure the build environment?

Accepted Answer

Use a custom build image that already includes the required Java version, stored in Amazon ECR.. Using a custom build image stored in Amazon ECR allows the team to pre-install the exact Java version required, eliminating the need for runtime installation. This minimizes build time by avoiding the overhead of downloading and installing software during every build, while still providing a consistent, reproducible environment.

Answer

Use AWS Lambda to run the tests and package the application.

Answer

Use a standard build image and include a pre-build command to install the required Java version.

Answer

Use the pre-build phase to download and install Java from an S3 bucket.

Question 10

A developer wants to automate the creation of a new Amazon ECS service whenever a new Docker image is pushed to Amazon ECR. Which AWS service should be used to orchestrate this workflow?

Accepted Answer

Amazon EventBridge. Amazon EventBridge can capture ECR image push events (via the 'ECR Image Action' event type) and route them to a target such as an ECS service or a Lambda function that triggers an ECS service update or creation. This serverless event bus natively integrates with ECR and ECS, making it the simplest and most direct service to orchestrate the workflow without custom polling or additional orchestration logic.

Answer

AWS Step Functions

Answer

Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Answer

Amazon S3