PAS-C01 Operations and Maintenance Practice Question
A company runs a production application on EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The instances are in an Auto Scaling group across three Availability Zones. The operations team notices that during a recent deployment, a small percentage of instances failed health checks and were replaced, causing a brief increase in error rates. What is the MOST effective way to reduce deployment-related errors?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse lifecycle hooks (which handle initialization before registration) with warm-up times (which control the gradual introduction of traffic after registration), leading them to pick Option A instead of the correct C.
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
✓
Configure the Auto Scaling group with a warm-up time in the instance refresh settings.
Configuring a warm-up time in the Auto Scaling group's instance refresh settings ensures that newly launched instances are fully initialized and pass health checks before they start receiving traffic. This prevents brief error spikes during deployments by allowing instances to stabilize before being marked as healthy and added to the ALB target group.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use a lifecycle hook to delay instance registration until a script completes.
Why it's wrong here
Lifecycle hooks add complexity and may not integrate with ALB health checks effectively.
- ✗
Increase the health check interval on the ALB to reduce rapid replacements.
Why it's wrong here
Longer interval may delay detection but doesn't prevent errors from cold instances.
- ✓
Configure the Auto Scaling group with a warm-up time in the instance refresh settings.
Why this is correct
Warm-up time ensures new instances pass health checks before receiving traffic.
- ✗
Increase the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group to absorb failures.
Why it's wrong here
More capacity doesn't address the root cause of errors during warm-up.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PAS-C01 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 PAS-C01 exam.