AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Exam Questions

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts (24%)

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A company currently provisions new servers over weeks by ordering, racking, and configuring physical hardware. After migrating to AWS, the company can provision equivalent compute capacity in minutes. Which benefit of the AWS Cloud does this illustrate?

⬜ Elasticity
⬜ Speed of deployment (agility)
⬜ Economies of scale
⬜ Global reach

An application’s traffic fluctuates significantly between daytime and nighttime. Which benefit of the AWS Cloud allows compute capacity to automatically increase during peak hours and decrease during off-peak hours?

⬜ High availability
⬜ Elasticity
⬜ Global infrastructure
⬜ Fixed costs

Which AWS Well-Architected Framework pillar focuses on the ability to run workloads effectively, gain insight into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes?

⬜ Security
⬜ Reliability
⬜ Operational Excellence
⬜ Performance Efficiency

A company wants to select AWS resource types (such as compute) that most efficiently meet its workload’s requirements, and to keep that efficiency as demand and technology change over time. Which Well-Architected Framework pillar does this describe?

⬜ Cost Optimization
⬜ Performance Efficiency
⬜ Sustainability
⬜ Security

A company is planning its migration to AWS and wants a structured set of guidance covering business, people, governance, platform, security, and operations perspectives to help it succeed. Which AWS resource is designed for this?

⬜ AWS Well-Architected Framework
⬜ AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)
⬜ AWS Trusted Advisor
⬜ AWS Marketplace

A company wants to migrate a database from on-premises to AWS with minimal changes to the underlying database engine, essentially moving it as-is to run on AWS infrastructure. Which migration strategy does this describe?

⬜ Refactor
⬜ Rehost (“lift and shift”)
⬜ Retire
⬜ Retain

Which statement correctly distinguishes between the on-premises and AWS Cloud cost models regarding compute infrastructure?

⬜ On-premises infrastructure is typically a variable cost, while AWS Cloud usage is a fixed cost paid upfront.
⬜ On-premises infrastructure typically requires a large upfront capital expenditure (a fixed cost), while AWS Cloud usage is generally billed as a variable operating expense based on actual consumption.
⬜ There is no cost model difference between on-premises and AWS Cloud infrastructure.
⬜ AWS Cloud requires the same upfront hardware purchase as on-premises infrastructure.

A company notices that several of its Amazon EC2 instances are consistently underutilized, running at low CPU utilization most of the time. Which cost-optimization concept involves adjusting resource types and sizes to better match actual workload requirements?

⬜ Rightsizing
⬜ Reserved Instance purchasing only
⬜ Consolidated billing
⬜ Data transfer optimization

A software vendor wants to bring an existing on-premises software license to AWS and use it on AWS infrastructure, rather than paying for a new AWS-included license. Which licensing concept does this describe?

⬜ Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
⬜ License-included pricing
⬜ Reserved Instance pricing
⬜ Spot pricing

Which of these is an example of achieving high availability for an application running on AWS?

⬜ Running the application on a single Amazon EC2 instance in one Availability Zone.
⬜ Deploying the application across multiple Availability Zones within a Region.
⬜ Storing all application data only on a local laptop.
⬜ Disabling all monitoring to reduce costs.

A large enterprise deploying the same workload individually would incur high infrastructure costs, but AWS can offer lower prices because it aggregates usage from millions of customers to negotiate better rates and achieve operational efficiencies. Which cloud economics concept does this describe?

⬜ Rightsizing
⬜ Economies of scale
⬜ Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
⬜ Total cost of ownership (TCO) only for on-premises

Which AWS Well-Architected Framework pillar was added to address minimizing the environmental impact of running cloud workloads, such as energy efficiency and resource usage?

⬜ Reliability
⬜ Sustainability
⬜ Cost Optimization
⬜ Security

A user deploys an Amazon RDS DB instance in multiple Availability Zones. This strategy involves which pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

⬜ Cost Optimization
⬜ Performance Efficiency
⬜ Reliability
⬜ Operational Excellence

Domain 2: Security and Compliance (30%)

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Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, which of the following is generally AWS’s responsibility, not the customer’s?

⬜ Configuring security group rules for an EC2 instance.
⬜ Security OF the cloud — protecting the physical infrastructure, hardware, and host operating systems that run AWS services.
⬜ Encrypting the customer’s own application data.
⬜ Managing IAM users and permissions.

For a managed database service like Amazon RDS, which of the following is the CUSTOMER’s responsibility under the Shared Responsibility Model?

⬜ Patching the underlying database engine software.
⬜ Maintaining the physical data center facilities.
⬜ Managing database access permissions, data content, and network configuration (such as security groups) for their database instance.
⬜ Replacing failed physical hard drives in the data center.

A company needs to download AWS’s compliance reports, such as SOC reports and ISO certifications, to satisfy an internal audit requirement. Which AWS service provides on-demand access to this compliance documentation?

⬜ AWS Artifact
⬜ AWS Trusted Advisor
⬜ AWS Config
⬜ AWS Shield

Which AWS service continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior, such as unusual API calls or potentially compromised EC2 instances, using machine learning and threat intelligence?

⬜ Amazon GuardDuty
⬜ AWS Config
⬜ AWS Artifact
⬜ AWS Budgets

A company’s public-facing web application needs protection against common web exploits, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), at the application layer. Which AWS service is purpose-built for this?

⬜ AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall)
⬜ AWS Shield only
⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ AWS Direct Connect

Which AWS service is specifically designed to provide protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

⬜ AWS Shield
⬜ AWS Config
⬜ Amazon Inspector
⬜ AWS Trusted Advisor

A company wants to continuously track configuration changes to its AWS resources and evaluate whether those configurations comply with internal policies over time. Which AWS service should they use?

⬜ AWS Config
⬜ AWS Budgets
⬜ Amazon SNS
⬜ AWS Direct Connect

Which AWS service records a detailed history of API calls made within an AWS account, including who made the call and when, supporting security analysis and auditing?

⬜ AWS CloudTrail
⬜ Amazon CloudWatch only
⬜ AWS Organizations
⬜ Amazon QuickSight

Which of these is considered a best practice for protecting the AWS account root user?

⬜ Use the root user account for all daily administrative tasks.
⬜ Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the root user and avoid using it for everyday tasks, creating IAM users/roles instead.
⬜ Share the root user credentials with the entire engineering team for convenience.
⬜ Disable password requirements on the root user account.

A company wants to require users to provide a second form of verification, such as a code from an authenticator app, in addition to their password when signing in to AWS. Which security feature should they enable?

⬜ Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
⬜ AWS Organizations
⬜ AWS Config rules
⬜ Amazon Route 53 failover routing

A company wants its employees to sign in once through a centralized portal and then access multiple AWS accounts and business applications without separate credentials for each. Which AWS service is designed for this kind of centralized workforce identity and single sign-on?

⬜ AWS IAM Identity Center
⬜ Amazon GuardDuty
⬜ AWS Shield
⬜ AWS Artifact

A development team needs to securely store and automatically rotate a database credential used by an application, rather than hardcoding it. Which AWS service is purpose-built for this?

⬜ AWS Secrets Manager
⬜ Amazon S3 Standard storage class
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53

Which principle states that users and systems should be granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform their required tasks, and no more?

⬜ Principle of least privilege
⬜ Principle of shared responsibility
⬜ Principle of economies of scale
⬜ Principle of elasticity

A company wants to identify security misconfigurations, get consolidated security findings, and check compliance status across multiple AWS security services in one centralized dashboard. Which AWS service aggregates this?

⬜ AWS Security Hub
⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon QuickSight

Which AWS service encrypts data and manages the cryptographic keys used to protect that data across many AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon RDS?

⬜ AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)
⬜ Amazon CloudWatch
⬜ AWS Trusted Advisor
⬜ Amazon SNS

Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services (34%)

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A company wants to define and provision its AWS infrastructure using version-controlled, repeatable configuration files rather than manually clicking through the AWS Management Console each time. Which approach does this describe?

⬜ Infrastructure as Code (IaC), such as using AWS CloudFormation.
⬜ Manual console-only provisioning.
⬜ Only using the AWS Command Line Interface interactively, one command at a time, with no saved files.
⬜ Physically racking new on-premises servers.

Which statement correctly describes the relationship between AWS Regions and Availability Zones?

⬜ A Region contains exactly one Availability Zone.
⬜ A Region is a physical geographic location that contains multiple, isolated Availability Zones, each consisting of one or more discrete data centers.
⬜ Availability Zones span multiple Regions.
⬜ Regions and Availability Zones are the same thing, just different names.

A company wants to serve cached content to end users with the lowest possible latency by placing content physically closer to users around the world. Which AWS global infrastructure component is designed for this?

⬜ Availability Zones
⬜ Edge locations (used by services like Amazon CloudFront)
⬜ AWS Direct Connect locations only
⬜ AWS Local Zones exclusively

A company running a business-critical application wants to ensure the application remains available even if an entire AWS Region becomes unavailable. Which strategy addresses this?

⬜ Deploy the application in a single Availability Zone only.
⬜ Deploy the application across multiple Availability Zones within a single Region only.
⬜ Deploy the application across multiple AWS Regions, so it can fail over if one Region becomes unavailable.
⬜ Rely solely on a single on-premises data center as a backup.

A company has a short-lived, fault-tolerant batch processing workload that can be interrupted, and wants to minimize compute costs. Which EC2 purchasing/compute option is typically the most cost-effective fit?

⬜ On-Demand Instances
⬜ Spot Instances
⬜ Dedicated Hosts
⬜ Savings Plans requiring a 3-year commitment

A company wants to run containerized applications without having to manage the underlying EC2 servers or clusters themselves. Which combination of AWS services fits this serverless container requirement?

⬜ Amazon EC2 with manually managed instances
⬜ Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS running on AWS Fargate
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53

A company wants to run short-lived, event-driven code (such as processing an uploaded file) without provisioning or managing any servers at all, paying only for the compute time consumed. Which AWS service fits this best?

⬜ AWS Lambda
⬜ Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon WorkSpaces

A company’s web application experiences unpredictable spikes in traffic. Which AWS capability automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances up or down based on demand?

⬜ Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
⬜ Amazon Route 53 only
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ AWS Artifact

A company wants to distribute incoming application traffic automatically across multiple EC2 instances in different Availability Zones to improve fault tolerance and availability. Which AWS service is designed for this?

⬜ Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
⬜ Amazon S3
⬜ AWS Storage Gateway
⬜ AWS Direct Connect

A company needs a fully managed relational database compatible with MySQL that automatically handles patching, backups, and replication. Which type of AWS database service fits this need?

⬜ Amazon DynamoDB
⬜ Amazon RDS (or Amazon Aurora)
⬜ Amazon ElastiCache
⬜ Amazon S3 Glacier

A company needs a fully managed, key-value and document NoSQL database that delivers consistent, single-digit millisecond performance at virtually any scale. Which AWS service fits this requirement?

⬜ Amazon DynamoDB
⬜ Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
⬜ AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)
⬜ Amazon Redshift

A company wants to reduce database read latency for a frequently accessed dataset by caching query results in memory. Which AWS service is purpose-built for this?

⬜ Amazon ElastiCache
⬜ AWS Storage Gateway
⬜ Amazon FSx
⬜ AWS Backup

Which core components make up an Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) network, allowing a company to define an isolated section of the AWS Cloud with its own IP address range?

⬜ Subnets, route tables, and gateways
⬜ S3 buckets only
⬜ DynamoDB tables only
⬜ AWS Lambda functions only

A company wants a scalable Domain Name System (DNS) web service to route end users to their application, and also wants to register a new domain name. Which AWS service provides both capabilities?

⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon CloudFront only
⬜ Amazon VPC

A company wants a dedicated, private network connection between its on-premises data center and AWS, bypassing the public internet for more consistent network performance. Which AWS service should they use?

⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ Amazon CloudFront
⬜ AWS Config

A company stores infrequently accessed data that must still be retrievable within milliseconds when needed, but wants to minimize storage costs compared to its frequently accessed data. Which Amazon S3 storage class fits this use case?

⬜ S3 Standard
⬜ S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA)
⬜ S3 Glacier Deep Archive
⬜ Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS

A company wants a fully managed AI service that can add pre-built machine learning capabilities like building conversational chatbots to its application without needing deep ML expertise. Which AWS service fits this?

⬜ Amazon Lex
⬜ Amazon EBS
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53

An organization is currently operating MySQL databases on its own on-premises servers. To reduce the operational burden of database maintenance and management, the organization wants to move to a fully managed AWS database offering. Which migration strategy best aligns with this goal?

⬜ Rehost the MySQL databases as-is on Amazon EC2 instances, keeping full control over the operating system and database software.
⬜ Use AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate the on-premises MySQL databases to Amazon RDS for MySQL.
⬜ Back up the on-premises databases to Amazon S3 and manually restore them onto new self-managed database servers within a VPC.
⬜ Replace the MySQL databases with Amazon DynamoDB tables to remove the need for database administration entirely.

Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support (12%)

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A company has a steady, predictable EC2 workload it expects to run continuously for the next year and wants to reduce its compute costs compared to On-Demand pricing in exchange for a commitment. Which purchasing option is generally the best fit?

⬜ Spot Instances
⬜ Reserved Instances or Savings Plans
⬜ Pay only On-Demand pricing with no commitment
⬜ Dedicated Hosts, chosen purely for cost savings

A company wants to set spending thresholds for its AWS usage and receive automated alerts when actual or forecasted costs exceed those thresholds. Which AWS service is designed for this?

⬜ AWS Budgets
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ AWS Artifact

A company wants to visualize and analyze its historical AWS spending patterns over time, broken down by service, to identify cost trends. Which AWS tool is designed for this?

⬜ AWS Cost Explorer
⬜ Amazon CloudWatch Logs
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53

Before deploying a new workload, a company wants to estimate the monthly cost of a proposed AWS architecture based on selected services and configurations. Which AWS tool is designed for this pre-deployment cost estimation?

⬜ AWS Pricing Calculator
⬜ AWS Config
⬜ Amazon GuardDuty
⬜ AWS CloudTrail

A company manages multiple AWS accounts for different departments and wants to combine usage across all accounts onto a single bill, potentially unlocking volume pricing discounts. Which AWS capability supports this?

⬜ AWS Organizations consolidated billing
⬜ AWS Direct Connect
⬜ Amazon Route 53
⬜ AWS Artifact

A startup with no dedicated operations team wants access to basic AWS Support for billing and account questions at no additional cost beyond their AWS usage. Which AWS Support plan provides this baseline?

⬜ AWS Basic Support, included automatically with every AWS account
⬜ AWS Enterprise Support only
⬜ AWS Business Support only
⬜ No support is available unless a paid plan is purchased