DOP-C02 Configuration Management and IaC 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 Elastic Beanstalk deployment action.

  Why it's wrong here

  An Elastic Beanstalk deployment action in AWS CodePipeline is designed to deploy applications to an AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment, which is a distinct PaaS compute service rather than Amazon ECS. Even when Elastic Beanstalk runs Docker containers, it manages its own platform, health checks, and capacity, and it does not interact with ECS services or task definitions. Using this action for an ECS workload would target the wrong service entirely, so it cannot perform an ECS deployment and is incorrect for this pipeline.

• ✗

  AWS CodeBuild with a buildspec that runs aws ecs update-service.

  Why it's wrong here

  While AWS CodeBuild can run any shell command, including aws ecs update-service, this is a procedural script, not a native CodePipeline deployment action. CodeBuild would require manual handling of task definition revisions, container image updates, and deployment state, and it lacks the integrated traffic shifting, health check validation, and automatic rollback capabilities that a managed deployment provider provides. This approach is essentially a custom workaround and does not meet the requirement for a CI/CD pipeline that natively deploys ECS with controlled rollouts.

• ✓

  Amazon ECS (Blue/Green) deployment provider with CodeDeploy.

  Why this is correct

  Amazon ECS (Blue/Green) with CodeDeploy is the correct native deployment provider for ECS in CodePipeline. CodeDeploy's ECS compute platform orchestrates the creation of a green task set, shifts traffic from the blue target group to the green target group in either linear or canary increments, and performs post-traffic-shift validation hooks defined in an AppSpec file. It also supports automatic rollback if the deployment fails health checks, making it the ideal, fully integrated choice for ECS blue/green deployments in a pipeline.

• ✗

  AWS CloudFormation deployment action to update the ECS service.

  Why it's wrong here

  A CloudFormation deployment action in CodePipeline is used to create or update CloudFormation stacks, which is an infrastructure-as-code approach rather than an application deployment action for ECS services. Although you could update an ECS service through CloudFormation, this would be a full stack update that does not provide the fine-grained traffic shifting, validation hooks, or automatic rollback of a blue/green deployment. The pipeline would not natively orchestrate the ECS deployment lifecycle; instead, it would just modify resources, so this is not a direct deployment provider for ECS workloads.

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