AWS (Amazon Web Services) Certification Practice Exam

Which of the following is true regarding EC2 instances in an ECS cluster?

1. They are automatically managed without user intervention

2. Users have to manually patch and scale them

3. They cannot run containerized applications

4. They are always the only compute option

The correct answer is: Users have to manually patch and scale them

The assertion that users have to manually patch and scale EC2 instances in an ECS (Elastic Container Service) cluster is accurate because ECS itself does not automatically manage the EC2 infrastructure. When you run your containerized applications on EC2 instances, you remain responsible for managing those instances, which includes tasks such as applying software updates (patching) and controlling the number of running instances (scaling) based on your workload requirements. ECS provides features that make it easier to manage and deploy containers, but the underlying EC2 instances do not come with automated patching or proactive scaling unless you specifically implement AWS services such as Auto Scaling. Therefore, users need to take an active role in maintaining and adjusting the resources that their containers run on. The other options present situations that do not align with the nature of EC2 instances in an ECS setup, such as misrepresenting the level of management and capabilities associated with containerized applications.