DVA-C02 Deployment Practice Question
A company uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a web application. The developer wants to perform a blue/green deployment to minimize downtime. The developer creates a new environment and deploys the new version. After verifying the new environment is healthy, the developer needs to swap the URLs so that traffic is routed to the new environment. Which AWS Elastic Beanstalk feature should the developer use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Use the 'Swap environment URLs' feature in the Elastic Beanstalk console.
Use the 'Swap environment URLs' feature in the Elastic Beanstalk console. This feature swaps the CNAME records between two environments, allowing you to route traffic to the new, healthy environment with minimal downtime. Option B is not recommended because deleting the old environment before fully verifying the new one is risky. Option C involves Route 53 weighted routing, which is not an Elastic Beanstalk feature and requires manual DNS management outside of Elastic Beanstalk. Option D is incorrect because environment CNAMEs are managed by Elastic Beanstalk and cannot be changed manually.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Use the 'Swap environment URLs' feature in the Elastic Beanstalk console.
Why this is correct
The 'Swap environment URLs' feature in Elastic Beanstalk is specifically designed for zero-downtime blue/green deployments. It atomically exchanges the CNAME records of two distinct environments, typically a 'blue' production environment and a 'green' new version. This ensures that traffic is seamlessly redirected to the new application version without any service interruption, making it ideal for deploying updates.
- ✗
Delete the old environment and update the DNS record to point to the new environment.
Why it's wrong here
Deleting the old environment and then manually updating a DNS record to point to the new environment would inevitably cause significant downtime. During the period between deleting the old environment (making it inaccessible) and the DNS propagation completing for the new record, users would experience service unavailability. This approach lacks the atomic, zero-downtime transition required for production applications.
- ✗
Use Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policies to shift traffic.
Why it's wrong here
While Amazon Route 53 weighted routing policies can indeed be used to shift traffic between different endpoints, this is a separate DNS-level feature and not an integrated blue/green deployment mechanism provided directly by Elastic Beanstalk. Implementing this would require manual configuration of Route 53 records outside of the Beanstalk console and would not leverage Beanstalk's streamlined environment management for such deployments.
- ✗
Change the environment's CNAME to point to the new environment.
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions and manages the CNAME record for each environment, associating it with the environment's load balancer or EC2 instance. Users cannot directly change an Elastic Beanstalk environment's CNAME because it is an internal identifier managed by the service. Attempting to manually alter this CNAME would break the environment's routing and render it inaccessible.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DVA-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DVA-C02 exam.