DOP-C02 SDLC Automation 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.

• ✓

  AWS CodePipeline

  Why this is correct

  AWS CodePipeline is the correct orchestrator for a CI/CD pipeline because it provides end-to-end workflow management, defining stages for source, build, test, deployment, and manual approval gates. It can trigger CodeBuild to build and push a container image, then use CodeDeploy or an ECS deploy action to update the ECS service, and even pause between environments (e.g., staging to production) for human sign-off. Its role is to coordinate the sequence and dependencies, not to execute the build or deployment itself, making it the central control plane for the pipeline.

• ✗

  AWS CodeBuild

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs unit tests, and produces build artifacts such as a packaged application or a Docker container image. It cannot deploy the built artifact to ECS—it only executes the build phase and publishes the artifact to a repository like Amazon ECR. While CodeBuild is often a stage within a CodePipeline, it lacks the ability to manage ECS service updates, traffic shifting, or approval gates, so it cannot serve as the deployment or orchestration engine.

• ✗

  AWS CloudFormation

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code service that provisions and manages AWS resources—such as ECS clusters, task definitions, services, load balancers, and IAM roles—using declarative templates. It can define the entire environment but does not handle the application release lifecycle (e.g., deploying a new container image version across a running service with traffic shifting). Additionally, CloudFormation does not natively include approval gates or stage-based promotion for CI/CD; it is designed for infrastructure updates, not orchestration of code deployments.

• ✓

  AWS CodeDeploy

  Why this is correct

  AWS CodeDeploy is the service that executes the actual deployment to AWS ECS, supporting blue/green deployment, canary, and linear traffic-shifting strategies. It takes an AppSpec file to define how to load the new task set and reroute traffic, and it integrates with the ECS service to manage task replacement and rollbacks. However, CodeDeploy is a deployment engine that needs to be invoked by an orchestrator; it does not provide the overall pipeline structure, source/building stages, or multi-stage approval workflow, so it is a correct participant but not the correct orchestrator.

• ✗

  AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a platform-as-a-service that automates provisioning of EC2 instances, load balancers, autoscaling, and application health monitoring for web applications. It uses its own managed platform and deployment mechanisms, which are not compatible with a custom ECS microservices architecture where you need fine-grained control over ECS task definitions, service discovery, and network configurations. Elastic Beanstalk is not designed to deploy to an existing ECS cluster or integrate with an ECS-based CI/CD pipeline, making it an unsuitable choice for this scenario.

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