SOA-C02 Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation Practice Question
A company runs a critical web application on a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer (ALB) across multiple Availability Zones. The application is deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk with a rolling update deployment policy. Recently, the development team pushed a new application version that introduced a memory leak. Within minutes, the instances started failing health checks, and Elastic Beanstalk initiated a replacement of the instances. However, during the replacement, the application experienced downtime because the new instances were not passing health checks, and the old instances were already terminated. The SysOps Administrator must modify the deployment to prevent downtime during future failed deployments. Which solution should the administrator implement?
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
✓
Implement a Blue/Green deployment using a separate Elastic Beanstalk environment and swap CNAMEs after testing.
Blue/Green deployment with Elastic Beanstalk creates a separate environment running the new version. Health checks validate the new instances before swapping the CNAME. If the new environment fails, the old environment continues serving traffic, eliminating downtime. Option A is wrong because increasing Auto Scaling sizes does not change the deployment policy; it only affects scaling limits. Option C is wrong because Classic Load Balancer lacks advanced health check features and does not address the deployment strategy. Option D is wrong because All at once deployment would replace all instances simultaneously, causing downtime even without failure, and does not provide a rollback mechanism.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the Auto Scaling group's minimum and maximum size to handle more instances.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling the Auto Scaling group changes capacity, not the rolling update's batch sequencing; instances are still replaced in batches, so failed health checks cause downtime. It is tempting because more instances appear to add headroom, but the fix is an immutable or blue/green deployment that keeps healthy old instances serving until new ones pass health checks.
- ✓
Implement a Blue/Green deployment using a separate Elastic Beanstalk environment and swap CNAMEs after testing.
Why this is correct
Blue/green keeps the original environment serving traffic until the new environment passes health checks, then swaps CNAMEs. This prevents downtime when a bad version fails health checks, unlike rolling updates that terminate old instances first.
- ✗
Replace the ALB with a Classic Load Balancer to reduce complexity.
Why it's wrong here
A Classic Load Balancer lacks the ALB's health-check and target-group behaviour the scenario depends on, and swapping load balancers does nothing to stop Elastic Beanstalk terminating old instances before new ones pass checks. Classic Load Balancers suit legacy EC2-Classic architectures needing basic Layer 4 or 7 routing.
- ✗
Change the deployment policy to All at once to speed up the deployment.
Why it's wrong here
All at once terminates every instance before deploying the new version, so a failed release leaves no healthy capacity serving traffic — the opposite of preventing downtime. It suits dev or test environments where brief total outage is acceptable and deployment speed matters most.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This SOA-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 SOA-C02 exam.