DVA-C02 Deployment Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Terminate the old environment after the new environment is deployed.

  Why it's wrong here

  Terminating the old environment is a post-deployment cleanup step in a blue/green strategy, occurring only after traffic has been successfully redirected to the new environment. Performing this action prematurely, before the CNAME swap, would lead to significant downtime as the old environment would become unavailable before the new one is serving traffic. Therefore, it is not the action that performs the blue/green deployment or traffic swap itself.

• ✗

  Add more EC2 instances to the existing environment.

  Why it's wrong here

  Adding more EC2 instances to an existing Elastic Beanstalk environment is a horizontal scaling operation designed to handle increased traffic load or improve application resilience. This action does not facilitate the deployment of a new application version, nor does it enable a blue/green deployment strategy, which fundamentally requires a separate environment for the new version and a mechanism to redirect traffic between distinct environments.

• ✓

  Deploy the new version to a separate Elastic Beanstalk environment.

  Why this is correct

  Deploying the new application version to a separate, distinct Elastic Beanstalk environment is the crucial initial step for implementing a blue/green deployment strategy. This action creates the 'green' environment, allowing the new version to be fully tested and validated in isolation without impacting the currently live 'blue' environment. This separation is fundamental to achieving zero-downtime deployments and ensuring stability.

• ✗

  Update the existing environment with the new version.

  Why it's wrong here

  Updating an existing Elastic Beanstalk environment with a new application version performs an in-place deployment. While Elastic Beanstalk offers various update policies (e.g., all-at-once, rolling, immutable), even immutable updates replace instances within the *same* environment. This method does not provide the isolation of a separate environment for testing and carries a higher risk of downtime or service disruption if issues arise during the update process, which is contrary to the goals of blue/green.

• ✓

  Swap the CNAME records of the two environments.

  Why this is correct

  Swapping the CNAME records between the old ('blue') and new ('green') Elastic Beanstalk environments is the definitive action that redirects all incoming user traffic to the newly deployed application version. This atomic operation ensures a near-instantaneous cutover, minimizing downtime and allowing for a rapid rollback by simply swapping the CNAMEs back if any critical issues are discovered post-deployment. This is the core mechanism of the blue/green traffic shift.

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