DOP-C02 Configuration Management and IaC Practice Question
An organization uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk for application deployments. They want to implement immutable updates to minimize downtime and ensure that if the new environment fails health checks, the old environment remains intact. Which deployment policy should they choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse 'immutable update' with 'traffic splitting' because both involve a new environment, but traffic splitting does not automatically terminate the new environment on health check failure—it requires manual intervention or additional automation to roll back.
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
✓
Immutable update.
Immutable updates in AWS Elastic Beanstalk launch a completely new environment with the new application version. If the new environment fails health checks, Elastic Beanstalk automatically terminates it, leaving the original environment untouched. This ensures zero downtime and a safe rollback, which matches the requirement to keep the old environment intact if health checks fail.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Traffic splitting.
Why it's wrong here
Traffic splitting is a canary deployment strategy that routes a small percentage of live traffic to the new application version while the majority remains on the old version. It is not an immutable deployment because both versions coexist within the same Elastic Beanstalk environment, and a failed rollout requires traffic re-routing rather than a clean environment swap. This offers less isolation than immutable updates and can still expose a subset of users to issues.
- ✓
Immutable update.
Why this is correct
Immutable update deploys the new application version to a completely new set of instances (or a fully separate environment) that runs alongside the old fleet. It waits for all new instances to pass health checks before shifting traffic to them, and if any fail, the old environment remains untouched, enabling an immediate, zero-impact rollback. This provides the strongest availability and isolation, making it the safest deployment policy.
- ✗
All at once.
Why it's wrong here
All at once replaces every running instance with the new application version simultaneously, with no staged rollout or minimal batch size. If the new version fails health checks, all instances are already affected, causing a full outage until a manual rollback is initiated. This offers no ability to validate a subset of instances before exposing the entire environment, resulting in the highest risk of downtime.
- ✗
Rolling update based on health.
Why it's wrong here
Rolling update based on health deploys the new version in batches across existing instances, waiting for each batch to pass health checks before proceeding. However, this approach does not launch a fully separate environment, so a bad version can incrementally replace healthy instances and progressively degrade capacity if the health checks are insufficiently sensitive. Rollback is also a slow reverse rolling process, making it less atomic and more time-consuming than an immutable update.
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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.