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AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) practice questions

8 sample questions from our 300-question Cloud Practitioner bank — one from each official domain, with the answer and a full explanation under each. Every question is original, written against the published exam objectives, and quality-checked before it reaches you.

CLF-C02FoundationalBeginner

Question 1 · Cloud Concepts

Marisol Vega runs infrastructure for Harbor Lantern Foods, whose on-premises order system sits idle most of the year but needs eight times its normal capacity during a three-week holiday rush. Today the company buys servers sized for that peak and lets them sit underused for eleven months. Which cloud value proposition most directly addresses this specific waste?

  1. A.Achieving lower latency for customers by placing servers closer to them geographically
  2. B.Guaranteeing that every workload will run without any configuration changes
  3. C.Trading capital expense for variable expense, paying only for the capacity consumed each month
  4. D.Removing the need to encrypt order data because the provider owns the hardware
Show answer & explanation

Answer: C

The waste described is money sunk into hardware that idles for most of the year, which is exactly the capital-to-variable-expense shift the cloud offers: capacity is provisioned and paid for as demand appears. Lower latency through geographic placement is a real cloud benefit, but it addresses user experience rather than the idle-capacity spending problem in the scenario.

Question 2 · Security and Compliance

Fenmoor Insurance runs an application on EC2 instances inside a VPC. During an audit, the security lead is asked which security tasks remain Fenmoor's responsibility under the AWS shared responsibility model. Which task belongs to Fenmoor?

  1. A.Controlling badge access to the data center where the hosts reside
  2. B.Replacing failed disks in the physical hosts backing the instances
  3. C.Applying operating system and application patches on the EC2 instances
  4. D.Maintaining the hypervisor that isolates tenants on each host
Show answer & explanation

Answer: C

For EC2, the guest operating system and everything installed on it are customer responsibilities, so patching that stack falls to Fenmoor. Physical media replacement, data center badge access, and the hypervisor all sit below the customer boundary and are managed entirely by AWS as security of the cloud.

Question 3 · Cloud Technology and Services

Quarry Lane Fitness runs a fleet of EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. Traffic is predictable during weekday mornings and evenings but collapses overnight, and the workload can tolerate an instance being replaced. Which purchasing and scaling combination is most appropriate?

  1. A.Provision the peak instance count manually and leave it running through the night
  2. B.Run every instance as a Dedicated Host to guarantee overnight capacity
  3. C.Run a small On-Demand baseline in an Auto Scaling group that scales on a schedule and metrics
  4. D.Purchase Reserved Instances sized to the morning peak and run that count continuously
Show answer & explanation

Answer: C

A modest baseline combined with an Auto Scaling group that responds to both a predictable schedule and live metrics matches capacity to the twice-daily peaks while shedding cost overnight. Reserving or manually running peak capacity around the clock pays for many idle hours every night, which is the waste the scenario is trying to avoid.

Question 4 · Billing, Pricing, and Support

Zinnia Coldworks runs production on AWS and needs to open a technical case at 2 a.m. when a workload is down. The company requires a response target of fifteen minutes for business-critical system outages and access to a designated technical account manager. Which support plan meets both?

  1. A.Enterprise Support
  2. B.Business Support
  3. C.Developer Support
  4. D.Basic Support
Show answer & explanation

Answer: A

Enterprise Support provides the fastest response target for business-critical system down cases and assigns a designated technical account manager. Business Support offers around-the-clock technical support with faster targets than Developer, but it does not include a designated technical account manager or the fifteen-minute business-critical response commitment.

Question 5 · Cloud Concepts

Tallgrass Analytics deploys a reporting application onto Amazon EC2 instances and configures an Auto Scaling group that adds instances when average CPU rises above 65 percent and removes them when it falls below 25 percent. Which two design characteristics is the team primarily gaining from this configuration?

  1. A.Regulatory compliance and audit certification, because scaling events are attested
  2. B.Elasticity and cost efficiency, because capacity tracks actual demand rather than a fixed guess
  3. C.Reduced application code complexity, because scaling removes the need for error handling
  4. D.Data durability and encryption at rest, because scaling replicates the reporting data
Show answer & explanation

Answer: B

Scaling instance count in response to a measured metric is the textbook expression of elasticity, and paying only for the instances actually running makes it cost efficient. Durability and encryption of stored data are properties of the storage layer and are unaffected by how many compute instances happen to be running.

Question 6 · Security and Compliance

Kestrel Studios has been signing in to the AWS Management Console with the account root user for daily work. A consultant recommends changing this practice immediately. What should the team do with the root user credentials going forward?

  1. A.Delete the root user entirely once IAM users have been created
  2. B.Share the root password with each team lead so any of them can respond to incidents
  3. C.Create an access key for the root user so automation scripts can use it
  4. D.Secure the root user with multi-factor authentication and use IAM identities for everyday tasks
Show answer & explanation

Answer: D

The root user has unrestricted access to every resource and billing function, so it should be protected with multi-factor authentication and reserved for the few tasks that require it, while day-to-day work uses least-privilege IAM identities. The root user cannot be deleted from an account, and creating root access keys spreads unrestricted credentials into automation, which is the opposite of the recommended practice.

Question 7 · Cloud Technology and Services

Rimefield Energy processes turbine sensor readings in a job that runs for about eight minutes each time a new file lands in Amazon S3, with runs occurring a few dozen times a day. The team wants no servers to manage and to pay only while the code runs. Which service fits?

  1. A.AWS Lambda triggered by S3 event notifications
  2. B.AWS Outposts installed at the turbine site
  3. C.Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet sized for continuous processing
  4. D.A permanently running EC2 instance polling the bucket every minute
Show answer & explanation

Answer: A

AWS Lambda runs code in response to events such as S3 object creation, requires no server management, and charges only for execution, which suits sporadic eight-minute jobs well within its runtime limit. A continuously running EC2 instance would bill for all the idle hours between the few dozen daily files.

Question 8 · Billing, Pricing, and Support

Marigold Transit Authority operates eleven AWS accounts and wants a single invoice, plus the chance that combined usage reaches higher volume discount tiers than any account would reach alone. Which capability delivers this?

  1. A.AWS Budgets configured with a shared threshold
  2. B.A separate Savings Plan purchased inside each account
  3. C.Consolidated billing through AWS Organizations
  4. D.Cost allocation tags applied uniformly across accounts
Show answer & explanation

Answer: C

Consolidated billing in AWS Organizations produces one bill for all member accounts and aggregates usage, which can push combined consumption into higher volume discount tiers. Cost allocation tags help attribute spending to teams or projects, but tagging alone neither combines invoices nor aggregates usage for pricing tiers.

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