DOP-C02 Practice Question 41: Manual Approval Production Gate
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) · Test 5 · question 1 of 10
A pipeline builds an application and deploys it to a staging environment automatically. Compliance now requires that a named release manager sign off before anything reaches production, that the release managers be notified by email as soon as the pipeline is waiting for them, and that nothing be deployed to production if no one responds.
What should the team add to the pipeline?
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Answer:
A manual approval action is the built-in release gate. CodePipeline stops "at the point where you want the pipeline execution to stop so that someone with the required AWS Identity and Access Management permissions can approve or reject the action." Configuring an SNS topic on the action means "a notification is published to the Amazon SNS topic, and a message is delivered to any subscribers... with a link to review the approval action in the console," which covers the email requirement. The no-response case is handled for free: "if no one approves or rejects the action within seven days... the result is the same as an action failing, and the pipeline execution does not continue." Scoping the approval permissions to the release managers' IAM role enforces who may sign off, and the approver's comment is recorded against the execution.
Option B rebuilds the feature in code. It needs a Lambda function, a DynamoDB table, a way for approvers to write records, and its own IAM permissions, and it produces no audit record of who approved which execution in the pipeline itself.
Option C is a pipeline-wide switch, not a per-release gate. A disabled transition holds executions at the stage boundary, and once a release manager enables it, it stays enabled, so the next release flows through unreviewed. It also records nothing about who approved what.
Option D breaks the release into two pipelines. Artifact lineage between the staging and production deployments is lost, there is nothing preventing someone from starting the production pipeline without the review, and the approval is not part of the execution history.
Reference: Add a manual approval action to a stage