A team builds the same stack — a load balancer, three EC2 instances and a database — by clicking through the console once for dev, once for test and once for production. The three environments have quietly drifted apart and a bug that only appears in production took a week to trace to a missing setting. They want the stack described once, reviewed in a pull request, and applied identically to each environment. Which service does that?
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), objective 3. Cloud technology and services medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
The options
Correct AWS CloudFormation
Correct. A template declares the resources and their settings, and applying the same template produces the same stack every time, so the description lives in version control where it can be reviewed and diffed.
Not correct AWS Config
Wrong, and it is the tempting near-miss. Config records how resources are configured over time and evaluates rules against them, so it would have TOLD you the environments had drifted. It never creates the environments in the first place.
Not correct AWS Systems Manager Session Manager
Wrong. Session Manager gives you a shell on an existing instance without opening SSH or a bastion. It operates servers that already exist; it does not provision load balancers or databases.
Not correct The AWS Management Console, with a written runbook for each step
Wrong. A runbook is a description of clicks that a human still has to perform correctly three times. That is exactly the process that produced the drift, and nothing about it is reviewable the way code is.
Why
Infrastructure as code means the environment is a file, not a memory of what someone clicked. CloudFormation takes a template and creates a stack from it; the AWS CDK lets you write that template in a programming language and synthesises CloudFormation underneath. Keep the pair straight: CloudFormation builds the resources, AWS Config watches them and reports when they stop matching what you wanted.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- AWS exam guide task statement 3.1
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 3 and space the ones you get wrong.
Practise AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02)
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