Question

Difficulty: MediumIdentify design principles of the AWS Cloud

A software development company is migrating its testing pipeline to the AWS Cloud. The operations team notices that manual configuration updates on staging servers have led to inconsistent test results across different release cycles. The team wants to adopt a design principle that ensures test environments are clean, predictable, and free from configuration drift, while also minimizing costs when tests are not running. Which of the following approaches best demonstrates the AWS Cloud design principle of using disposable resources to meet these requirements?

  1. A
    Maintain a single, dedicated Amazon EC2 instance that runs continuously, and manually apply updates and cleanup scripts after each test cycle.
  2. Define the testing environment as code to programmatically launch fresh Amazon EC2 instances for each test run, and terminate the instances immediately after testing completes.Answer
  3. C
    Configure an Auto Scaling group with a permanent minimum capacity of five instances, scaling up the instance sizes during peak test times.
  4. D
    Deploy the application, database, and test suite together on a single, large Amazon EC2 instance to ensure tight coupling and minimize communication latency.

Answer

Define the testing environment as code to programmatically launch fresh Amazon EC2 instances for each test run, and terminate the instances immediately after testing completes.
The correct answer is to programmatically launch fresh instances for each test run and terminate them afterwards. This defines the 'disposable resources' principle where infrastructure is treated as temporary, ensuring a consistent test state free of drift and avoiding charges for idle resources.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the core problem and requirement.
The company needs clean, consistent test environments to avoid configuration drift and minimize costs when idle.
Understanding the requirement helps isolate the specific cloud design principle required.
2
Evaluate the design principle of disposable resources.
Disposable resources are dynamic, created on-demand, and terminated when no longer needed.
This principle ensures environments are built from a known, clean state every time.
3
Select the option that automates creation and destruction of resources.
Launching fresh instances using infrastructure as code and terminating them immediately after use aligns perfectly.
It addresses both configuration consistency (fresh state) and cost optimization (terminated when idle).

Key Concept

Disposable Resources
Estimated Time:1m 15s
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