AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (legacy) — Question 596

A company designed a specialized Amazon EC2 instance configuration for its Data Scientists. The Data Scientists want to create and delete EC2 instances on their own, but are not comfortable with configuring all the settings for EC2 instances without assistance. The configuration runs proprietary software that must be kept private within the company's AWS accounts, and should be available to the Data Scientists, but no other users within the accounts.
Which solution should a SysOps Administrator use to allow the Data Scientists to deploy their workloads with MINIMAL effort?

Answer options

• A. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) of the EC2 instance. Share the AMI with authorized accounts owned by the company. Allow the Data Scientists to create EC2 instances with this AMI.
• B. Distribute an AWS CloudFormation template containing the EC2 instance configuration to the Data Scientists from an Amazon S3 bucket. Set the S3 template object to be readable from the AWS Organizations orgId.
• C. Publish the instance configuration to the Private Marketplace. Share the Private Marketplace with the company's AWS accounts. Allow the Data Scientists to subscribe and launch the product from the Private Marketplace.
• D. Upload an AWS CloudFormation template to AWS Service Catalog. Allow the Data Scientists to provision and deprovision products from the company's AWS Service Catalog portfolio.

Correct answer: D

Explanation

AWS Service Catalog allows administrators to create, manage, and govern portfolios of approved IT services, enabling non-technical users like Data Scientists to easily provision pre-configured resources with minimal effort. Sharing an AMI or a raw CloudFormation template (Options A and B) still requires the Data Scientists to understand and manage deployment configurations, which does not minimize their effort. AWS Private Marketplace (Option C) is intended for governing third-party software subscriptions rather than managing internal proprietary AWS resource templates.