Deployment And Delivery Design — AWS SysOps Administrator (SOA-C03)
Blue/Green Strategy and Execution Service Are Separate Choices
A deployment scenario mentions limiting blast radius during a production release. Candidates reach for blue/green deployment — directionally correct. But the exam distinguishes which service implements it for a given compute type. CodeDeploy manages blue/green for EC2 and Lambda. ECS supports blue/green through CodeDeploy integration. CloudFormation handles stack updates but does not natively control traffic shift percentages. Selecting the right strategy without the right execution service is still a wrong answer.
What This Pattern Tests
The exam tests deployment pipeline design with service-appropriate strategies. CodePipeline orchestrates source-build-test-deploy stages with manual approval gates. CodeDeploy supports blue/green on ECS (shift traffic between task sets), canary on Lambda (shift 10% then all), and rolling on EC2. For DOP-C02, CloudFormation StackSets deploy infrastructure across multiple accounts and regions simultaneously, while change sets preview modifications before execution. For AIF-C01 and MLS-C01, SageMaker Pipelines orchestrate ML workflows — data processing, training, evaluation, and model registration — with Model Registry tracking model versions and approval status before deployment to endpoints. The trap is using CodeDeploy for ML model deployment (SageMaker Pipelines handles the ML lifecycle) or CloudFormation direct updates without change sets in production.
Decision Axis
Deployment risk tolerance and workload type determine the pipeline: application code uses CodePipeline, infrastructure uses CloudFormation StackSets, ML models use SageMaker Pipelines.
Associated Traps
More Top Traps on This Exam
Decision Rules
Which detection mechanism correctly anchors template-declared desired state: CloudFormation drift detection (which compares live resource attributes against the stack template) versus AWS Config rules (which evaluate individual resource properties against predefined rule logic but are unaware of which stack declared those attributes or what value the template expects).
Domain Coverage
Difficulty Breakdown