SOA-C02 Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to automate the provisioning of AWS resources using infrastructure as code. The solution must track changes and allow rollbacks. Which AWS service should the administrator use?
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
✓
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation provides infrastructure as code with change tracking and rollback capabilities. Option B (AWS Config) is for compliance and auditing, not provisioning. Option C (AWS Service Catalog) is for managing approved products, not general IaC. Option D (AWS OpsWorks) is a configuration management service, not primarily IaC.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
AWS CloudFormation
Why this is correct
AWS CloudFormation is the core Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service on AWS. You define resources declaratively in JSON or YAML templates, and CloudFormation creates and updates those resources as stacks. It automatically rolls back changes on failure, providing safe, repeatable provisioning of entire environments. This makes it the correct choice for automating provisioning.
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AWS Config
Why it's wrong here
AWS Config is a governance and compliance service that records configuration changes and evaluates them against rules. It does not create, update, or delete AWS resources—it only observes and audits. While it can trigger remediation, the remediation itself is handled by other services (like Systems Manager), not by Config. Therefore, it is not a provisioning tool.
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AWS Service Catalog
Why it's wrong here
AWS Service Catalog is a governance layer that lets administrators create and manage portfolios of approved cloud products. When a user launches a product, Service Catalog provisions resources using an underlying CloudFormation template, but the sysops administrator is not directly automating infrastructure; instead, they are enabling self-service for end users. It is not designed as a general IaC automation service.
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AWS OpsWorks
Why it's wrong here
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that integrates with Chef and Puppet. It focuses on managing server configuration, deployments, and lifecycle on EC2 instances, rather than declaratively provisioning cloud resources. It does not provide the same pure Infrastructure as Code workflow as CloudFormation, making it unsuitable for the stated need of automating provisioning.
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JA
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.