Q9 — AWS DOP-C02 Ch.1

Question 9 of 100 | ← Chapter 1

A company recently migrated its application to AWS. The application is hosted on Amazon EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer, which is placed behind Amazon API Gateway. The company wants to ensure minimal disruption to users when deploying new versions of the application. It also wants to ensure rapid rollback capability in case of issues.

• A. Introduce the change as a separate, parallel environment alongside the existing one. Configure Amazon API Gateway to use a canary release deployment to route a small percentage of user traffic to the new environment. ✓
• B. Introduce the change as a separate, parallel environment alongside the existing one. Update the application's DNS alias record to point to the new environment.
• C. Introduce the change as a separate target group behind the existing Application Load Balancer. Configure Amazon API Gateway to gradually route user traffic to the new target group.
• D. Introduce the change as a separate target group behind the existing Application Load Balancer. Configure Amazon API Gateway to route all traffic to the Application Load Balancer, and then have the Application Load Balancer route traffic to the new target group.

Correct Answer: A. Introduce the change as a separate, parallel environment alongside the existing one. Configure Amazon API Gateway to use a canary release deployment to route a small percentage of user traffic to the new environment.

Explanation

In AWS deployment strategies, canary release enables routing a small, controlled percentage of traffic to a new environment for monitoring and rapid rollback. Amazon API Gateway natively supports canary deployments without requiring architectural changes to backend components such as ALB or DNS. Option A leverages API Gateway’s built-in traffic-shifting mechanism, requiring only configuration—not infrastructure modification—aligning with the principle of minimal change. Option B introduces DNS propagation delays and slow rollback; Options C and D involve ALB target group modifications, increasing complexity and operational overhead. Correct answer is A (per AWS Well-Architected Framework deployment best practices).