AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional — Question 7

A company is creating a software solution that executes a specific parallel-processing mechanism. The software can scale to tens of servers in some special scenarios. This solution uses a proprietary library that is license-based, requiring that each individual server have a single, dedicated license installed. The company has 200 licenses and is planning to run 200 server nodes concurrently at most.
The company has requested the following features:
✑ A mechanism to automate the use of the licenses at scale.
✑ Creation of a dashboard to use in the future to verify which licenses are available at any moment.
What is the MOST effective way to accomplish these requirements?

Answer options

• A. Upload the licenses to a private Amazon S3 bucket. Create an AWS CloudFormation template with a Mappings section for the licenses. In the template, create an Auto Scaling group to launch the servers. In the user data script, acquire an available license from the Mappings section. Create an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook, then use it to update the mapping after the instance is terminated.
• B. Upload the licenses to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Create an AWS CloudFormation template that uses an Auto Scaling group to launch the servers. In the user data script, acquire an available license from the DynamoDB table. Create an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook, then use it to update the mapping after the instance is terminated.
• C. Upload the licenses to a private Amazon S3 bucket. Populate an Amazon SQS queue with the list of licenses stored in S3. Create an AWS CloudFormation template that uses an Auto Scaling group to launch the servers. In the user data script acquire an available license from SQS. Create an Auto Scaling lifecycle hook, then use it to put the license back in SQS after the instance is terminated.
• D. Upload the licenses to an Amazon DynamoDB table. Create an AWS CLI script to launch the servers by using the parameter --count, with min:max instances to launch. In the user data script, acquire an available license from the DynamoDB table. Monitor each instance and, in case of failure, replace the instance, then manually update the DynamoDB table.

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Option B is correct because it leverages Amazon DynamoDB to efficiently manage license availability and automate the license acquisition process during server launches. The other options either use S3, which is not ideal for dynamic license management, or involve manual updates and monitoring, which do not meet the automation requirement.