DOP-C02 Security and Compliance Practice Question
A DevOps engineer is designing a CI/CD pipeline for a microservices application. The pipeline must scan container images for vulnerabilities before deploying to Amazon ECS. Which service should the engineer use to perform the vulnerability scan?
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
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Amazon ECR image scanning
Amazon ECR can scan images for vulnerabilities. Option A is wrong because AWS WAF is a web application firewall. Option C is wrong because AWS Config is for compliance and resource inventory. Option D is wrong because Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service for workloads.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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AWS WAF
Why it's wrong here
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that protects HTTP(S) endpoints by filtering malicious traffic using rules such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting. It operates at the network/application layer and has no ability to inspect container images or evaluate software package vulnerabilities. Therefore, WAF cannot serve as a step to identify known security issues in images within a CI/CD pipeline.
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Amazon ECR image scanning
Why this is correct
Amazon ECR image scanning automatically checks container images for known vulnerabilities (CVEs) by integrating with Amazon Inspector. In a CI/CD pipeline, you can invoke a scan after pushing an image to ECR, then retrieve findings via an API and block the deployment if critical vulnerabilities exist. This directly satisfies the requirement to identify known security vulnerabilities in images before they are deployed.
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AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a service that records resource configuration changes and evaluates them against compliance rules, such as checking whether an S3 bucket is public or if a resource is tagged correctly. It does not perform content-level inspection of container images, nor does it consult CVE feeds for software versions. Thus, Config cannot detect vulnerabilities inside an image's layers.
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Amazon GuardDuty
Why it's wrong here
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that analyzes account behavior, including CloudTrail logs, VPC Flow Logs, and DNS queries, to identify malicious activity like unexpected traffic or compromised credentials. While GuardDuty offers some container protection for runtime threats in EKS, it does not scan container images for known vulnerabilities as part of an artifact pipeline. Hence it is not a substitute for image scanning.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DOP-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 DOP-C02 exam.