DBS-C01 Deployment and Migration Practice Question
This DBS-C01 practice question tests your understanding of deployment and migration. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
Refer to the exhibit. A company is creating an IAM policy for a migration engineer who needs to perform a database migration from an on-premises SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server using AWS DMS. The policy is attached to the engineer's IAM user. Which additional permission is required for the engineer to create a DMS replication instance?
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
ec2:CreateInstance (or equivalent)
To create a DMS replication instance, AWS DMS launches an Amazon EC2 instance in the customer's VPC to run the replication engine. The IAM user must have permission to call ec2:RunInstances (or the equivalent ec2:CreateInstance action) to provision this underlying compute resource. Without this EC2 permission, the DMS service cannot spin up the replication instance, and the migration engineer will receive an authorization error.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
✗
kms:CreateKey
Why it's wrong here
KMS permissions are optional for encryption, not required for creating the instance.
✗
dms:CreateEndpoint
Why it's wrong here
Creating endpoints does not require EC2 permissions.
✗
s3:PutObject
Why it's wrong here
S3 permissions are not needed for creating a replication instance.
✓
ec2:CreateInstance (or equivalent)
Why this is correct
DMS replication instances require EC2 permissions to be created.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates assume DMS replication instances are fully managed by AWS and require no EC2 permissions, but in reality DMS provisions EC2 instances in the customer's account, making ec2:RunInstances a mandatory permission.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, when you call the CreateReplicationInstance API, DMS uses the customer's VPC subnet group and security groups to launch an EC2 instance of a specified instance class (e.g., dms.c5.large). This instance runs the DMS engine and requires network interfaces (ENIs) to be created, which also depend on ec2:CreateNetworkInterface permissions. In real-world scenarios, if the IAM policy lacks ec2:RunInstances, the DMS console will show a 'You are not authorized to perform this operation' error even if all other DMS permissions are granted.
KKey Concepts to Remember
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
→Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
→Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
A media company stores terabytes of video archives that are accessed once a year for audit purposes. Moving these objects to a cold storage tier (Azure Archive, S3 Glacier, or Google Nearline) costs a fraction of hot storage. Questions like this test whether you understand storage tiers, access frequency tradeoffs, and retrieval latency requirements.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
Deployment and Migration — This question tests Deployment and Migration — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: ec2:CreateInstance (or equivalent) — To create a DMS replication instance, AWS DMS launches an Amazon EC2 instance in the customer's VPC to run the replication engine. The IAM user must have permission to call ec2:RunInstances (or the equivalent ec2:CreateInstance action) to provision this underlying compute resource. Without this EC2 permission, the DMS service cannot spin up the replication instance, and the migration engineer will receive an authorization error.
What should I do if I get this DBS-C01 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Question Discussion
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