DOP-C02 domain - 22% of the exam

SDLC Automation

SDLC Automation is 22% of the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C02) exam. These are the objectives it covers, each with practice questions and worked explanations.

Objectives in this domain

Sample question from this domain

Free sampleSDLC Automationmedium

A company runs its AWS CodePipeline in a shared tooling account but deploys the built artifacts into a separate production account using a CloudFormation deploy action. The pipeline currently fails at the deploy stage with an access denied error, even though a cross-account IAM role exists in the production account. The team encrypts the pipeline artifact store with a customer managed AWS KMS key. They want the most reliable way to let the production-account role read the artifacts and deploy them. Which change resolves the failure while keeping access scoped?

  • AGrant the production-account deploy role permission to use the customer managed KMS key in the key policy, and allow the tooling-account pipeline role to assume that role, so the role can decrypt and read the artifacts. Correct
  • BReplace the customer managed KMS key on the artifact bucket with the default Amazon S3 managed key, because cross-account CodePipeline actions cannot decrypt artifacts protected by a customer managed key under any configuration.
  • CMake the artifact S3 bucket public-read so the production account can fetch the artifacts directly, then attach an administrator policy to the cross-account role so it has enough permissions to deploy.
  • DMove the entire pipeline into the production account so no cross-account artifact access is needed, then have developers push source directly into that account to avoid configuring any assume-role trust.
For cross-account CodePipeline deploys with a customer managed KMS key, the target role needs both assume-role trust and key-usage rights to decrypt artifacts. When a CodePipeline artifact store uses a customer managed AWS KMS key, any cross-account role that reads those artifacts must be listed as a key user in the key policy in addition to having S3 read access and assume-role trust; without the KMS grant the deploy action gets access denied even though the IAM role exists.

Why A is correct: Cross-account actions fail when the deploy role cannot decrypt the artifacts; adding the role as a key user in the KMS key policy plus the assume-role trust lets it read the encrypted artifact and deploy, with access scoped to that one role.

Why B is wrong: Cross-account decryption with a customer managed key is fully supported once the key policy and bucket grants are correct, so downgrading encryption sacrifices control to fix a problem that is really a missing grant.

Why C is wrong: A public bucket and an administrator policy both breach least privilege and expose build output, and neither addresses the KMS decryption grant that is the actual cause of the access denied error.

Why D is wrong: Collapsing accounts removes the separation the company chose and is a large re-architecture, when the failure is simply a missing KMS key grant on the existing cross-account role.

Other domains in this exam

See also the DOP-C02 cert hub, the study guide, and the cheat sheet.

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