Superficial answer about SSM Parameter Store and AMI automation

[Marco Scalerandi]

I think the marked-as-correct answer to the following question is misleading due to missing critical details.

Question

A mobile phone manufacturer hosts a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to several Amazon EC2 instances in their AWS VPC. Its DevOps team is using AWS CloudFormation templates to design, launch, and deploy resources to their cloud infrastructure. Each template is manually updated to map the latest AMI IDs of the ERP solution. This process takes a significant amount of time to execute, which is why the team was tasked to automate this process.

In this scenario, which of the following options is the MOST suitable solution that can satisfy the requirement?

Marked as correct

Use Systems Manager Parameter Store with CloudFormation to retrieve the latest AMI IDs. Call update-stack when you want to update the EC2 instances.

Issue with this answer

This explanation is too superficial. Read as-is, it suggests that Parameter Store somehow already contains the latest AMI IDs, which is simply false.

SSM Parameter Store is not an AMI discovery service. It does nothing unless:

• an external process (pipeline, Lambda, Packer, etc.) explicitly writes the AMI ID into it.

Only after that automation exists does CloudFormation referencing the parameter make sense.

Without stating this, the answer glosses over the most important part of the solution and can easily confuse anyone studying or preparing for an exam.

• This discussion was modified 7 months, 1 week ago by  Marco Scalerandi.

[Ariel Tchougang]

Hello Marco,

I got a similar feeling. However sometimes this AWS DevOps Engineer Pro exam isn’t about finding the perfect solution, but rather choosing the least worst option out of the given propositions. And in this instance this was the case.

[Irene-TutorialsDojo]

Hi Marco,

Thank you for taking the time to provide such a detailed and technically accurate observation — you’re absolutely right.

SSM Parameter Store is not an AMI discovery service, and the explanation as written does skip over a critical prerequisite: an external automation process (such as a Lambda function, CI/CD pipeline, or a build tool like Packer) must first write the latest AMI ID into Parameter Store before CloudFormation can reference it. Without that upstream process in place, the integration with CloudFormation doesn’t work on its own.

We have updated the explanation to include this important context so it no longer misleads anyone studying this topic. The changes will be reflected on the portal shortly.

We truly appreciate feedback like yours; it helps us maintain the accuracy and depth of our content for everyone preparing for the exam.

Best regards,

Irene @ Tutorials Dojo