DVA-C02 Deployment Practice Question
A development team uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk to deploy a containerized application. They notice that after a successful deployment, the environment's health turns from Green to Red. The application logs show no errors. What is the most likely cause?
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
✓
The ELB health check endpoint returns a 503 status code after the new version is deployed.
After a successful deployment, the environment turns Red if the ELB health check endpoint returns a non-200 status (e.g., 503) on the new version. Elastic Beanstalk uses ELB health checks to determine environment health; if the health check fails, the environment health changes to Red even if application logs show no errors. Option B is incorrect because a missing environment variable typically causes deployment failure or immediate instance health issues, not a post-deployment health change. Option C is incorrect because Docker image incompatibility with the platform version would cause deployment failure or instance launch failure, not a health change after successful deployment. Option D is incorrect because a low Auto Scaling minimum instance count does not directly affect health status after a successful deployment; it would affect scaling behavior.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
The ELB health check endpoint returns a 503 status code after the new version is deployed.
Why this is correct
Elastic Beanstalk's enhanced health reporting is derived primarily from the associated load balancer's target health checks; if the new application version returns HTTP 503 (or fails to respond) on the configured health check path after deployment, the ELB marks targets unhealthy and Beanstalk immediately reflects that as Red, even though application-level logs show nothing because the failure is at the HTTP response layer, not an exception.
- ✗
The deployment failed due to a missing environment variable.
Why it's wrong here
A missing environment variable would typically cause the application to throw a startup or runtime exception that appears in the application logs, and Elastic Beanstalk would generally report the deployment itself as failed rather than showing a successful deploy that later degrades to Red with clean logs.
- ✗
The application's Docker image is not compatible with the platform version.
Why it's wrong here
An incompatible Docker image would typically prevent the container from starting at all, which Elastic Beanstalk reports as a deployment failure with container/docker daemon errors in the event stream, not as a silent transition from a successful Green deployment to Red with empty logs.
- ✗
The Auto Scaling group's minimum instance count is too low.
Why it's wrong here
The Auto Scaling group's minimum instance count is a capacity setting that determines how many instances are kept running; it does not change as a side effect of a deployment and would not explain why a previously Green environment suddenly reports Red immediately after a successful deploy.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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