Question 1,005 of 1,660
SAP-C02 Practice Question: Design Solutions for Organizational Complexity
A company has a multi-account AWS environment using AWS Organizations with 50 accounts. The accounts are organized into OUs based on environment: Production, Staging, and Development. The central IT team uses AWS CloudFormation StackSets to deploy a baseline network configuration (VPC, subnets, security groups) to all accounts. Recently, the network team updated the stack set to add a new subnet to the VPC. After the update, they noticed that the stack set operation failed for 10 accounts. The error message indicates that the stack set cannot update because a resource already exists. What is the MOST LIKELY cause of this failure?
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
✓
Some accounts have manually created resources that conflict with the stack set template's resources.
StackSets deploy a common template across accounts. If a resource defined in the template (e.g., a subnet with a specific CIDR) already exists in an account due to manual creation or prior configuration, the update fails with a 'resource already exists' error. Option A is incorrect because OU configuration affects initial deployment, not updates, and the error is about resource conflict, not OU coverage. Option C is incorrect because IAM permissions would cause an 'access denied' error, not a resource conflict. Option D is incorrect because drift detection does not prevent updates; it only reports differences.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
The accounts are in different OUs and the stack set is not configured to deploy to all OUs.
Why it's wrong here
Stack sets can be deployed to multiple OUs, and the update succeeded for most accounts, indicating the stack set is correctly configured.
- ✓
Some accounts have manually created resources that conflict with the stack set template's resources.
Why this is correct
If a resource with the same logical ID already exists outside the stack, CloudFormation cannot update the stack and throws an error.
- ✗
The network team does not have sufficient IAM permissions to update stacks in those accounts.
Why it's wrong here
If permissions were insufficient, the operation would fail with an access denied error, not a resource exists error.
- ✗
The stack set was previously drift-detected and the drift is preventing updates.
Why it's wrong here
Drift detection does not block updates; it just reports differences.
Visual reference
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Last reviewed: Jun 20, 2026
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