Question

A software company wants to provide each of its 200 developers with an isolated, on-demand development environment that includes an EC2 instance, an RDS PostgreSQL database, and a small VPC. Environments are used intermittently and should be created quickly when a developer starts work and fully torn down when idle to minimize cost. The platform team wants a repeatable, self-service provisioning mechanism that enforces tagging, budget limits, and a curated set of approved configurations, without giving developers direct IAM permissions to create the underlying resources. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Publish approved environment definitions as AWS Service Catalog products (backed by CloudFormation), apply launch constraints and TagOptions, and let developers self-provision and terminate products through the Service Catalog console.

Answer

Grant each developer an IAM role with permissions to launch EC2, RDS, and VPC resources, and distribute a shared CloudFormation template they can deploy manually.

Answer

Use AWS Config rules and Systems Manager Automation documents that developers trigger to build environments, relying on Config to remediate any non-compliant resources after creation.

Answer

Create a single large multi-tenant EC2 instance and RDS cluster shared by all developers, using separate OS accounts and database schemas for isolation.