DOP-C02 Incident and Event Response 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.

• ✓

  EC2: Virtual servers in the cloud

  Why this is correct

  Amazon EC2 is a true Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering: you provision resizable virtual machines (instances) with full control over the AMI, operating system, kernel, and installed software. It provides persistent compute capacity (vCPUs, memory, storage) and lets you manage patching, security, and scaling at the infrastructure layer. This distinguishes it from managed container or serverless services.

• ✓

  ECS: Managed container orchestration service for Docker

  Why this is correct

  Amazon ECS is AWS's native container orchestration engine, purpose-built for running Docker containers at scale without the operational burden of operating a Kubernetes control plane. It uses task definitions and services to schedule containers across a cluster that can run on EC2 instances or with AWS Fargate, which manages the underlying servers. ECS integrates natively with IAM roles, CloudWatch, and Application Load Balancers.

• ✓

  EKS: Managed Kubernetes service

  Why this is correct

  Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that runs the Kubernetes control plane across multiple Availability Zones while your worker nodes reside in your own AWS account. AWS handles the Kubernetes API server, etcd, and upgrades, and you use standard Kubernetes tools such as kubectl and Helm. EKS also adds AWS integrations like IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) to connect Kubernetes identities with AWS permissions.

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  Lambda: Run code without provisioning servers

  Why this is correct

  AWS Lambda is a compute service that executes your code in response to events without you provisioning, scaling, or managing any servers. Each invocation runs inside a managed runtime environment that scales horizontally and automatically, and you are billed only for the duration of execution. This makes Lambda ideal for event-driven workloads, API backends, and scheduled jobs rather than long-running containerized applications.

• ✗

  EC2: Serverless compute service

  Why it's wrong here

  Calling EC2 a serverless compute service is incorrect because EC2 always requires you to select an instance type, provision a virtual machine, and manage the guest OS, patching, and capacity. Serverless compute eliminates this by abstracting away infrastructure entirely and scaling to zero when idle. Even when Auto Scaling is used, you are still paying for underlying EC2 instances rather than for code execution time, which is precisely what Lambda provides.

• ✗

  ECS: Managed Kubernetes service

  Why it's wrong here

  Amazon ECS does not provide a Kubernetes-compatible API; it uses its own proprietary control plane and scheduling constructs such as tasks, task definitions, and services. The AWS service that offers managed Kubernetes is EKS, which supports the standard Kubernetes API and ecosystem. Confusing the two would break tooling like kubectl and Helm, so ECS should be classified strictly as AWS's native Docker orchestration service.