SOA-C03 practice question: CloudFormation and the AWS CDK (1 of 3)

Deployment, Provisioning, and Automation A free question from our original SOA-C03 practice exam. Try it, then open the answer to see why each option is right or wrong.

A public library manages its catalog database, an Amazon RDS DB instance, with AWS CloudFormation. A developer has updated the template to change the DB instance identifier and the storage type. Before anything is applied to production, the operations team wants to see exactly which resources CloudFormation will modify and whether any will be replaced. What should a CloudOps engineer do?

Choose one answer.

A. Run drift detection on the stack and review which resources CloudFormation reports as modified.
B. Create a change set from the new template and check the Replacement value for each change.
C. Validate the new template with the ValidateTemplate API and review the list of resources it returns.
D. Apply a stack policy that denies all updates, run the update, and read the errors for each blocked resource.

Show the answer and explanation

Answer: B

A. Wrong: Drift detection compares live resources with the template that is already deployed. It does not show what a new template would change. Learn more: Detect unmanaged configuration changes to stacks and resources with drift detection (opens in a new tab)
B. Right: Correct. A change set shows how a proposed template would change each resource before anything happens. The Replacement field shows whether a resource such as the DB instance would be replaced. Learn more: Update CloudFormation stacks using change sets (opens in a new tab)
C. Wrong: Template validation checks syntax and returns parameters and capabilities. It does not compare the template with the running stack or report replacements.
D. Wrong: A stack policy blocks updates to protected resources, and the update would fail and roll back. It is a protective control, not a way to preview a change. Learn more: Prevent updates to stack resources (opens in a new tab)

Explanation

Change sets let you preview a stack update. CloudFormation compares the proposed template with the current stack and lists each change, including whether a resource will be replaced, as happens when a DB instance identifier changes. Nothing is applied until the change set is executed.

SOA-C03 practice question: CloudFormation and the AWS CDK (1 of 3)

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