SOA-C02 Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation Practice Question
A SysOps administrator needs to deploy the same AWS CloudFormation template across multiple AWS accounts and Regions in a single operation. The administrator wants to manage the deployment from a single management account. Which AWS service should the administrator use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse AWS Service Catalog (which can provision CloudFormation stacks but only within a single account or via StackSets integration) with the native multi-account deployment capability of CloudFormation StackSets, leading them to select Service Catalog as the answer.
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 StackSets
AWS CloudFormation StackSets extends the functionality of CloudFormation by allowing you to deploy the same template across multiple accounts and Regions from a single management account. StackSets uses a self-managed or service-managed permission model to create, update, and delete stacks across target accounts in a single operation, making it the correct choice for this multi-account, multi-Region deployment requirement.
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 CodeDeploy
Why it's wrong here
AWS CodeDeploy is a deployment service that automates the release of application code to running compute services such as EC2, on-premises instances, and AWS Lambda. Its primary focus is on updating the application content on existing infrastructure, not on creating or orchestrating infrastructure resources. CodeDeploy has no native ability to define a template of AWS resources and deploy it across multiple accounts and Regions in a single operation, so it cannot satisfy the requirement to deploy identical infrastructure stack artifacts.
- ✗
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Why it's wrong here
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a Platform-as-a-Service offering that handles the provisioning and scaling of application environments within a single AWS account and a single Region. Each Elastic Beanstalk environment is tied to one account and one Region, and its design is to simplify deploying and managing an application, not to roll out a standardized set of infrastructure resources across multiple accounts. Attempting to use Elastic Beanstalk for multi-account infrastructure deployment would require manually recreating the environment in every account/Region and lacks the centralized stack orchestration and rollback capabilities of CloudFormation StackSets.
- ✓
AWS CloudFormation StackSets
Why this is correct
AWS CloudFormation StackSets is the correct service because it extends the capability of CloudFormation to deploy stacks across multiple AWS accounts and multiple Regions from a single administrator account. You define a CloudFormation template once, and StackSets creates and manages stack instances in target accounts/Regions, propagating updates and handling automatic rollback if any deployment fails. This provides the centralized, repeatable, and cross-account infrastructure deployment exactly as the sysops administrator needs.
- ✗
AWS Service Catalog
Why it's wrong here
AWS Service Catalog is designed for governance and management of a catalog of approved IT services; administrators create products from CloudFormation templates and grant end users permission to provision them through portfolios. While Service Catalog does use CloudFormation under the hood, each provisioning operation deploys a product to a single account and Region at a time. It does not natively orchestrate simultaneous deployment of a template into multiple accounts and Regions—that capability is provided by CloudFormation StackSets, which Service Catalog can integrate with but is not itself.
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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.