Module 4: Building a Better Pipeline

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In this post, I provide complete, accurate, and detailed explanations for the answers to Module 4: Building a Better Pipeline of Course 6: DevOps on AWS and Project Management

Whether you’re preparing for quizzes or brushing up on your knowledge, these insights will help you master the concepts effectively. Let’s dive into the correct answers and detailed explanations for each question!

Self-reflection: Updating your Application

Graded Assignment

1. Communication is important to any DevOps organization. You need to be able to tell other teams, customers, managers—that is, anyone who uses your application—about how it’s running. Is there a pending update? Was there an outage? Is there a problem that needs to be fixed? The list of things that you need to communicate can go on and on.In this exercise, you practice your communication skills. You need to write two separate emails that will notify different stakeholders about a pending update that requires the downtime of your store web application, which is publicly available.Information about the pending update includes the following:

The 10 instances that run the application will be going offline for 30 minutes to update the underlying code base.

No customer data will be lost.

This deployment will take place next Thursday at 22:00.

The Development, Database, and Operations teams need to be ready to act if something goes wrong during the deployment.

Take a few minutes and draft a sample email to both your external customers and your internal IT teams. There’s no one right way to write either of these emails. However, the more that you practice this kind of communication. the easier it will be in the future. When you write these emails, it’s important to remember the following points:

Your customers don’t need the technical details of what’s going to happen.

Internal IT teams need the most amount of technical detail.

Both groups care about the timing of when the update will happen, but the IT organization needs specific time windows so they can be prepared to take action, if needed.

Everyone cares about not losing customer data.


Email to External Customers (Non-Technical)

Subject: Upcoming Scheduled Maintenance for Our Store Web Application

Dear Customer,

We’re reaching out to inform you about a scheduled update to our store web application that will require a brief period of downtime.

When: Thursday at 22:00 (local time)
Duration: Approximately 30 minutes
Impact: The application will be temporarily unavailable during this time.
Important: No customer data will be lost or affected during the update.

This update will help us deliver a better, more secure shopping experience. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to make our services even better.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact our support team.

Thank you for being a valued customer.

Warm regards,
[Your Name]
DevOps Team | [Company Name]

Email to Internal IT Teams (Technical)

Subject: Scheduled Deployment – Action Required from Dev, DB, and Ops Teams

Hello Team,

We will be performing a scheduled deployment next Thursday at 22:00, which will involve updating the underlying code base of the store web application. As part of this process, all 10 instances running the application will be taken offline for approximately 30 minutes.

Key Details:

  • Deployment Time: Thursday, [Date], starting at 22:00
  • Estimated Downtime: 30 minutes
  • Services Affected: Public-facing store web application
  • Customer Impact: Temporary unavailability of the app — no customer data will be lost
  • Rollback Plan: In case of failure, instances will revert to the previous stable deployment

Action Required:

  • Dev Team: Be ready to assist in case of deployment or compatibility issues.
  • DB Team: Monitor database interactions; ensure backup snapshots are taken 1 hour before deployment.
  • Ops Team: Monitor system health, resource utilization, and logs throughout the process.

Please confirm availability for deployment monitoring. Let’s ensure a smooth and successful rollout.

Thanks,
[Your Name]
DevOps Lead | [Company Name]

Final Assessment

Graded Assignment

2. A cloud consultant is redesigning the current software development process for their customer. Right now, the team sends the software requirements to the developers, who then work independently on their part of the software development project. The project requirements for the software are flexible and change on a regular basis. Which project management methodology should the consultant recommend to the team?

  • Waterfall
  • Agile ✅
  • Source Control
  • Team management

Explanation:
This option reflects a clear, actionable task that directly supports the goal of adapting to changing project requirements. Agile methodology is designed for flexibility and iterative development, making it a better fit than Waterfall when requirements are expected to evolve regularly.

3. A cloud consultant is working with a software development team. The team wants to build a DevOps continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to assist in the creation, deployment, and testing of software. The consultant is looking for a tool to manage the different stages of the pipeline. The tool they use will need to work with native AWS DevOps tools and third-party solutions. Which tool should the consultant select for this situation?

  • AWS CodeBuild
  • AWS CodeDeploy
  • AWS CodePipeline ✅
  • AWS CodeCommit

Explanation:
This option reflects a clear, actionable task that directly supports the goal of managing the stages of a CI/CD pipeline. AWS CodePipeline integrates natively with AWS DevOps tools and supports third-party services, making it ideal for orchestrating the entire software release process.

4. A software team recently caused an outage when they deployed a new application to the production environment. A cloud consultant has been tasked with selecting a new deployment strategy for the team. The deployment strategy must be able to control the flow of traffic between older versions of an application and the new update that is being deployed. If an issue is detected, the team needs to be able to roll back the changes to the previous code to avoid an outage. Which deployment strategy should the consultant select to address these requirements?

  • Rolling deployment
  • In-place deployment
  • Canary deployment
  • Blue/green deployment ✅

Explanation:
This option reflects a clear, actionable task that directly supports the goal of minimizing deployment risk and enabling rollbacks. Blue/green deployment allows switching traffic between two environments, providing the ability to instantly roll back if issues are found in the new version.

5. A developer is working on a software team. They need to get the latest version of the code from a Git repository in AWS CodeCommit. However, they do not know how to use Git and are having trouble pulling down a local copy of the code. Which command should the developer use to retrieve the code from the repository and store a copy of it on their laptop?

  • git push
  • git clone ✅
  • git branch
  • git log

Explanation:
This option reflects a clear, actionable task that directly supports the goal of retrieving a repository to a local machine. git clone is the command used to copy a remote Git repository (like one on AWS CodeCommit) to a developer’s local environment.

6. A consultant has been asked to create a build by using AWS CodeBuild. The build needs configure to authentication by signing in to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). Which phase of the buildspec file should the consultant use to perform the sign-in process?

  • Install
  • Post-build
  • Reports
  • Pre-build ✅

Explanation:
This option reflects a clear, actionable task that directly supports the goal of authenticating to a container registry before starting the build. The pre-build phase is intended for actions such as authentication and setup tasks that must be completed before the main build steps.

Related contents:

Module 1: Defining the Project
Module 2: Project Management Methodologies
Module 3: Introduction to DevOps

You might also like:

Course 1: Introduction to Information Technology and AWS Cloud
Course 2: AWS Cloud Technical Essentials
Course 3: Providing Technical Support for AWS Workloads
Course 4: Developing Applications in Python on AWS
Course 5: Skills for Working as an AWS Cloud Consultant
Course 7: Automation in the AWS Cloud
Course 8: Data Analytics and Databases on AWS
Course 9: Capstone: Following the AWS Well Architected Framework

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