AWS DevOps Engineer Professional Practice Test

If unmanaged changes are made to an Elastic Beanstalk environment, what happens when you clone that environment?

1. Unmanaged changes will be included in the clone.

2. Unmanaged changes will not be included in the clone.

3. The clone will prompt for unmanaged changes.

4. The clone will overwrite unmanaged changes.

The correct answer is: Unmanaged changes will not be included in the clone.

When cloning an Elastic Beanstalk environment, the clone does not incorporate any unmanaged changes made to the source environment. Unmanaged changes refer to modifications that are made directly to the environment outside of the standard deployment mechanisms provided by Elastic Beanstalk, such as manual adjustments to the EC2 instances or changes made through other AWS services without going through the Elastic Beanstalk management processes. The cloning process essentially replicates the configuration and application versions of the source environment as they exist at the time of cloning. It captures the managed aspects such as the environment configuration, application version, and environment variables configured through the Elastic Beanstalk console or CLI. By excluding unmanaged changes from the clone, Elastic Beanstalk helps maintain a clean and consistent deployment process, ensuring that the cloned environment reflects the intended state defined by infrastructure as code or managed deployments. The distinction is critical for maintaining predictable infrastructure and reducing the risk of configuration drift between environments. This design allows teams to focus on version-controlled and managed changes, facilitating better deployment practices and environment management over time.