AWS Certified Developer – Associate (DVA-C02) — Question 280

A company wants to test its web application more frequently. The company deploys the application by using a separate AWS CloudFormation stack for each environment. The company deploys the same CloudFormation template to each stack as the application progresses through the development lifecycle.

A developer needs to build in notifications for the quality assurance (QA) team. The developer wants the notifications to occur for new deployments in the final preproduction environment.

Which solution will meet these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. Subscribe the QA team to the Amazon SNS topic. Update the CloudFormation stack options to point to the SNS topic in the pre-production environment.
• B. Create an AWS Lambda function that notifies the QA team. Create an Amazon EventBridge rule to invoke the Lambda function on the default event bus. Filter the events on the CloudFormation service and on the CloudFormation stack Amazon Resource Name (ARN).
• C. Create an Amazon CloudWatch alarm that monitors the metrics from CloudFormation. Filter the metrics on the stack name and the stack status. Configure the CloudWatch alarm to notify the QA team.
• D. Create an AWS Lambda function that notifies the QA team. Configure the event source mapping to receive events from CloudFormation. Specify the filtering values to limit invocations to the desired CloudFormation stack.

Correct answer: A

Explanation

AWS CloudFormation allows users to configure NotificationOptions (SNS topics) directly within the stack settings, which triggers notifications for all stack events. By applying this configuration solely to the pre-production stack, only deployments in that environment will notify the QA team without requiring any modifications to the shared CloudFormation template. Other options either involve unnecessary architectural complexity or rely on unsupported configurations, such as directly mapping CloudFormation as an event source for Lambda.