Question 12
Domain 2: Configuration Management and Infrastructure as CodeA company uses a series of individual Amazon CloudFormation templates to deploy its multi-Region applications. These templates must be deployed in a specific order. The company is making more changes to the templates than previously expected and wants to deploy new templates more efficiently. Additionally, the data engineering team must be notified of all changes to the templates. What should the company do to accomplish these goals?
Correct answer: D
Explanation
CloudFormation nested stacks let you break a solution into smaller templates and deploy them in a defined order, which fits the need for more frequent template changes and efficient updates. Stack sets are designed to deploy the same CloudFormation stacks across multiple Regions, and Amazon SNS can publish notifications so the data engineering team is alerted to all template changes.
Why each option is right or wrong
A. Create an AWS Lambda function to deploy the CloudFormation templates in the required order. Use stack policies to alert the data engineering team.
Lambda can orchestrate steps, but stack policies are for resource protection, not team notifications.
B. Host the CloudFormation templates in Amazon S3. Use Amazon S3 events to directly trigger CloudFormation updates and Amazon SNS notifications.
S3 can store templates, but S3 events are not the right direct mechanism for ordered multi-template deployments.
C. Implement CloudFormation StackSets and use drift detection to trigger update alerts to the data engineering team.
StackSets help multi-Region rollout, but drift detection finds configuration drift, not template-change notification workflows.
D. Leverage CloudFormation nested stacks and stack sets for deployments. Use Amazon SNS to notify the data engineering team.
CloudFormation nested stacks are the supported way to decompose a large solution into smaller templates and control dependencies between them, so the deployment order can be enforced through stack references rather than manual sequencing. For the multi-Region requirement, AWS CloudFormation StackSets are the service feature built to deploy and update the same stack across multiple Regions and accounts from a single template, which is more efficient when template changes are happening frequently. To notify the data engineering team of every template change, CloudFormation can publish stack events to Amazon SNS, which then pushes alerts to subscribed endpoints immediately.