Developers debate how to apply the same baseline across 200 AWS accounts. The Management Console is slow for that volume. What approach should they favor?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Two hundred identical baselines is not a click-marathon job. Programmatic tools and IaC scale; the console is for interactive one-offs.
Full Explanation
When developers must apply the same baseline across 200 AWS accounts and the Management Console is too slow for that volume, they should favor infrastructure as code or other programmatic approaches for repeatable scale. Account baselines—guardrails, IAM roles, logging buckets, Config recorders, VPC patterns—are applied consistently with CloudFormation StackSets, AWS Control Tower/Account Factory patterns, CLI/SDK automation, or equivalent pipelines far more reliably than human clicking.
The Management Console alone is impractical for building 200 identical account baselines and increases drift risk. One shared desktop session clicking through each account manually fails audit and least-privilege expectations. Printing IAM console screenshots as checklists cannot enforce configuration and becomes outdated immediately.
Exam caveat: Scale + identical baselines → programmatic/IaC, not console. Console remains useful for exploration and break-glass investigation, not mass account fabrication.
Operational check: define a baseline template or Control Tower blueprint, deploy via StackSets or account-vending pipeline into each municipal OU, verify Config conformance packs after vending, and prohibit unmanaged “just this once” console baselines unless followed by template backports. Measure time-to-harden for a new department account as a KPI.