SOA-C02 Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator is using AWS CodeDeploy to deploy a new version of an application to a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances. The deployment must minimize downtime and automatically roll back if any instance fails health checks. The administrator needs to configure the deployment group settings. Which two actions should the administrator take to meet these requirements? (Choose two.)
⚠ Common exam trap
The trap here is focusing solely on deployment configuration (like OneAtATime) and overlooking that automatic rollback and load balancer health checks are separate settings that must be explicitly enabled.
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
✓
Associate the deployment group with an Application Load Balancer and enable load balancer health checks.
To minimize downtime and automatically roll back on failure, the administrator should enable automatic rollback in the deployment group and associate the deployment group with an Application Load Balancer with health checks. Automatic rollback ensures recovery from failures, while load balancer health checks ensure that only healthy instances receive traffic. Together, these settings provide a safe deployment with minimal downtime.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Configure the deployment configuration to use a custom deployment configuration with a minimum healthy hosts value of 0.
Why it's wrong here
Setting minimum healthy hosts to 0 means that all instances can be taken offline during deployment, which would cause downtime. This contradicts the requirement to minimize downtime. A custom deployment configuration should specify a minimum healthy hosts value greater than 0 to ensure availability, and it still does not provide automatic rollback.
- ✓
Associate the deployment group with an Application Load Balancer and enable load balancer health checks.
Why this is correct
Associating the deployment group with an Application Load Balancer and enabling load balancer health checks allows CodeDeploy to validate the health of new instances before routing traffic to them. If an instance fails health checks, the deployment can be stopped and rolled back. This helps minimize downtime by ensuring only healthy instances serve traffic.
- ✗
Configure the deployment configuration to use CodeDeployDefault.HalfAtATime.
Why it's wrong here
HalfAtATime deploys to half of the instances at a time, which can reduce downtime compared to AllAtOnce, but it does not automatically roll back on failure. It also may not minimize downtime as effectively as a rolling deployment with health checks. The requirement for automatic rollback is not met by this configuration alone.
- ✗
Configure the deployment configuration to use CodeDeployDefault.OneAtATime.
Why it's wrong here
OneAtATime deploys to one instance at a time, which minimizes downtime if you have multiple instances, but it does not automatically roll back on failure. Rollback must be enabled separately. Also, OneAtATime is slow and may not be optimal for large fleets, but it does meet the 'minimize downtime' requirement. However, the key missing piece is rollback, so this alone is not sufficient.
- ✓
Enable automatic rollback on deployment failure in the deployment group settings.
Why this is correct
Enabling automatic rollback ensures that if a deployment fails, CodeDeploy automatically rolls back to the last known good revision. This meets the requirement to automatically roll back if any instance fails health checks. It is a critical setting for minimizing downtime and maintaining application availability during deployments.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Amazon Web Services exam blueprint
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