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Difficulty: MediumIdentify design principles of the AWS Cloud

A company runs a retail website on AWS. During updates, the operations team manually logs into Amazon EC2 instances to update software packages and configuration files. This manual process has caused configuration drift, leading to intermittent application failures across different servers. To fix this, the team decides to use AWS CloudFormation to automatically provision new, identical EC2 instances from a pre-configured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for every deployment, and terminate the old ones. Which AWS Cloud design principle is demonstrated by this new deployment strategy?

  1. A
    Tight coupling, by keeping all application configurations and operating system updates bundled directly within the host's local storage.
  2. B
    Elasticity, by vertically scaling the memory and CPU of the existing instances during periods of high configuration changes.
  3. Disposable resources, by replacing configuration-drifted servers with newly bootstrapped, standardized instances instead of updating them in place.Answer
  4. D
    Monolithic design, by ensuring that all components of the application run on a single permanent virtual server.

Answer

Disposable resources, by replacing configuration-drifted servers with newly bootstrapped, standardized instances instead of updating them in place.
The strategy of terminating old servers and launching new, identical instances using automated templates (AWS CloudFormation) and pre-configured images (AMIs) demonstrates the principle of disposable resources. In cloud computing, resources should be treated as temporary and easily replaceable, which prevents configuration drift and ensures consistency across environments.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the core problem described in the scenario.
The operations team is experiencing configuration drift and application failures due to manual, in-place server updates.
Understanding the problem helps identify which cloud design pattern directly addresses it.
2
Analyze the proposed solution.
The team will use AWS CloudFormation to automatically spin up new instances using a standard AMI and terminate the old ones.
This shows the team is moving away from maintaining long-running, manually updated servers and instead programmatically replacing them.
3
Map the solution to AWS cloud design principles.
Replacing resources programmatically rather than updating them in place corresponds to the design principle of 'disposable resources instead of fixed servers'.
This aligns with the AWS Well-Architected Framework recommendation to treat infrastructure as temporary and easily replaceable.

Key Concept

Disposable resources instead of fixed servers
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Identify design principles of the AWS Cloud

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