CV0-004 Deployment Practice Question
A DevOps team is implementing a canary deployment for a microservice running on Amazon ECS. They want to gradually shift 10% of traffic to the new version and automatically roll back if error rates exceed 1% in 5 minutes. Which combination of services should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mistake is assuming that any orchestration service (like Step Functions) is equivalent to a native deployment service, but the key is that CodeDeploy provides built-in traffic shifting and alarm-based rollback without custom code, which is exactly the requirement in the question.
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 CodeDeploy with CloudWatch alarms
AWS CodeDeploy natively supports canary deployments for Amazon ECS, allowing you to specify a traffic shift percentage (e.g., 10%) and integrate with CloudWatch alarms to automatically trigger a rollback when error rates exceed a defined threshold (e.g., 1% over 5 minutes). This combination directly fulfills the gradual traffic shifting and automated rollback requirements without custom scripting.
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 and SSM
Why it's wrong here
CloudFormation provisions infrastructure and SSM stores parameters or runs commands, but neither shifts live traffic weights between ECS task sets nor reacts to CloudWatch error-rate alarms within five minutes. CloudFormation suits declarative stack deployment, not runtime canary traffic control.
- ✗
AWS Lambda and Step Functions
Why it's wrong here
Lambda and Step Functions cannot intercept Application Load Balancer traffic destined for ECS tasks, so no 10% split or error-rate-triggered rollback is possible. Step Functions suits orchestrating serverless workflows, not managing ECS task-set traffic weights.
- ✓
AWS CodeDeploy with CloudWatch alarms
Why this is correct
CodeDeploy natively supports ECS canary and linear traffic shifting, and its deployment configuration can reference CloudWatch alarms to trigger automatic rollback. This directly satisfies the 10% gradual shift and the 1%-error-rate/5-minute rollback constraint without custom scripting.
- ✗
AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Route 53
Why it's wrong here
Elastic Beanstalk orchestrates EC2/ECS deployments but cannot split traffic 10/90 between two ECS task sets; Route 53 weighted records shift at DNS level without CloudWatch alarm-driven rollback. It suits whole-environment blue/green releases, not per-request canary weighting on ECS.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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