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CLF-C02 sample questions with answers

10 free practice questions for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. Try each one, then open the answer to see why the right option wins and every other option loses.

Question 1Cloud Concepts

After migrating, a company asks which part of its AWS spend behaves like a fixed cost rather than a variable one. Which of the following behaves that way?

  1. A.

    A three-year All Upfront Reserved Instance bought for a steady workload

  2. B.

    Data transferred out of a Region

  3. C.

    On-Demand Amazon EC2 usage billed per second

  4. D.

    Amazon S3 storage billed per GB-month

Show answer

Answer: A

A three-year All Upfront Reserved Instance is committed regardless of usage, so it behaves as a fixed cost.

  • A. The commitment is owed for the whole term regardless of how much usage occurs, which is fixed-cost behaviour.
  • B. Data transfer is charged per gigabyte moved, so it falls to zero when nothing is transferred.
  • C. On-Demand usage is billed per second of running time and stops when the instance stops.
  • D. Storage is charged per gigabyte-month, so deleting data reduces the charge; that is variable.
Question 2Cloud Concepts

A publisher buys servers three years ahead of demand and still runs out of capacity during launch events. Which advantage of cloud computing addresses this problem?

  1. A.

    Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers

  2. B.

    Benefit from massive economies of scale

  3. C.

    Stop guessing capacity

  4. D.

    Go global in minutes

Show answer

Answer: C

Buying hardware against a forecast is exactly the problem the "stop guessing capacity" advantage removes.

  • A. This advantage removes the work of operating a data center, but a company could still mis-size capacity while AWS runs the facility.
  • B. Economies of scale explain the low per-unit price AWS can charge, not the ability to change capacity after the fact.
  • C. This advantage exists precisely to remove the up-front capacity guess that leads to idle or insufficient hardware.
  • D. Going global in minutes addresses geographic reach and latency, and the scenario says nothing about new locations.
Question 3Cloud Concepts

An architect must explain to a finance committee how elasticity differs from high availability in the AWS Cloud. Which statement is correct?

  1. A.

    Elasticity keeps a workload running through failures; high availability matches capacity to demand

  2. B.

    Both terms describe paying only for the resources actually consumed

  3. C.

    Both terms describe recovering a workload after a Region-wide outage

  4. D.

    Elasticity matches capacity to demand; high availability keeps a workload running through failures

Show answer

Answer: D

Elasticity is about matching capacity to demand; high availability is about surviving component failure.

  • A. The two definitions are swapped, which is the most common confusion the exam tests here.
  • B. Paying only for what is consumed is the pay-as-you-go pricing model, not a definition of either term.
  • C. Recovering from a Region-wide event is disaster recovery, a separate concept from either term.
  • D. This states each definition the right way round: capacity tracking demand versus surviving component failure.
Question 4Cloud Concepts

A manager rejects Amazon RDS because its hourly price is higher than an Amazon EC2 instance running the same database engine. Which argument addresses the economics of that comparison correctly?

  1. A.

    The RDS price includes patching, backup and failover work the team would otherwise do

  2. B.

    Amazon RDS is always cheaper per hour than Amazon EC2

  3. C.

    Amazon EC2 instances are not able to run database engines

  4. D.

    Staff time has no bearing on the total cost of running a workload

Show answer

Answer: A

The managed service costs more per hour because it includes work the team would otherwise pay its own people to do.

  • A. The higher rate buys operational work that would otherwise consume the team’s time, which a rate-only comparison ignores.
  • B. It is usually the opposite: the managed service often carries the higher hourly rate, which is what prompted the objection.
  • C. Database engines run perfectly well on Amazon EC2; that is exactly what the self-managed option means.
  • D. Staff time is a real and often dominant cost, which is why total cost of ownership includes it.
Question 5Cloud Concepts

Which phase of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework transformation journey focuses on delivering pilot initiatives in production and demonstrating incremental business value?

  1. A.

    Launch

  2. B.

    Envision

  3. C.

    Align

  4. D.

    Scale

Show answer

Answer: A

The Launch phase is where pilots go into production and prove incremental business value.

  • A. Launch is defined as delivering pilot initiatives in production and demonstrating incremental business value.
  • B. Envision identifies and prioritizes transformation opportunities before anything is built.
  • C. Align identifies capability gaps across the six perspectives and builds cloud readiness strategies.
  • D. Scale expands proven pilots to full size and ensures the expected benefits are sustained.
Question 6Cloud Concepts

Which cost is least likely to become variable when a company migrates its applications from its own data center to AWS?

  1. A.

    Server capacity provisioned for the seasonal peak

  2. B.

    Storage capacity for log data that keeps growing

  3. C.

    The salaries of the application development team

  4. D.

    Compute capacity used by a nightly batch job

Show answer

Answer: C

Migration converts infrastructure costs into variable ones, but the development team’s salaries stay fixed.

  • A. Peak capacity becomes variable: it is added for the season and removed afterwards, and billed accordingly.
  • B. Storage is charged per gigabyte stored, so growing log data becomes a smoothly variable cost.
  • C. Salaries are paid continuously regardless of workload volume, so they remain a fixed cost after migration.
  • D. A nightly batch job is charged only while it runs, which is variable by definition.
Question 7Cloud Concepts

An enterprise must track how many commercial database licences it is consuming across several AWS accounts and be warned before it exceeds the terms of its agreement. Which AWS service does this?

  1. A.

    AWS License Manager

  2. B.

    AWS Config

  3. C.

    AWS Cost Explorer

  4. D.

    AWS Budgets usage alerts

Show answer

Answer: A

AWS License Manager tracks licence consumption against defined rules and can warn or block when limits are reached.

  • A. It is purpose-built to define licence rules and track consumption against them across accounts and Regions.
  • B. AWS Config evaluates resource configuration against rules but has no concept of licence entitlement counts.
  • C. Cost Explorer analyses and forecasts spend; it reports money, not licence compliance.
  • D. AWS Budgets alerts on cost or usage thresholds, which is unrelated to a vendor licence agreement.
Question 8Cloud Concepts

AWS measures the value of cloud adoption across several dimensions beyond infrastructure cost savings. Which two of the following are among those dimensions? (Choose TWO.)

Choose 2.

  1. A.

    A lower corporate tax rate

  2. B.

    Operational resilience

  3. C.

    Revenue from reselling retired hardware

  4. D.

    A reduced electricity tariff from the local utility

  5. E.

    Staff productivity

Show answer

Answer: B, E

Staff productivity and operational resilience are two of the value dimensions AWS measures beyond cost savings.

  • A. Corporate tax rates are set by governments; no cloud service changes them.
  • B. Operational resilience is a named value dimension, covering improved availability, security and compliance.
  • C. Disposing of old hardware is a one-off transaction, not a continuing dimension of cloud value.
  • D. Utility tariffs are negotiated with the power company and are unaffected by which cloud provider a customer uses.
  • E. Staff productivity is a named value dimension: engineering time released from undifferentiated work.
Question 9Cloud Concepts

A company plans to buy three-year commitments for a fleet of instances that averages 12 percent CPU utilization. What should it do first, and why?

  1. A.

    Leave the fleet unchanged, because utilization does not affect price

  2. B.

    Rightsize the fleet first, so the commitment is not made against oversized instances

  3. C.

    Buy the commitment and rightsize afterwards at no penalty

  4. D.

    Buy the commitment first, because the discount applies at any instance size

Show answer

Answer: B

Rightsize before committing, or the company locks in three years of discount on capacity it does not need.

  • A. Utilization is the evidence that determines the right size, and size is what determines the price.
  • B. Sizing to real demand first means the commitment is made against capacity the workload actually needs.
  • C. Commitments are contractual for their term; rightsizing afterwards does not release the money already committed.
  • D. A discount on an oversized instance still pays for unused capacity, for the whole committed term.
Question 10Cloud Concepts

Patching 400 Amazon EC2 instances by hand consumes two nights of engineer time every month. Which AWS service automates that operational work?

  1. A.

    AWS Systems Manager

  2. B.

    AWS CloudTrail

  3. C.

    AWS Config

  4. D.

    Amazon Inspector

Show answer

Answer: A

AWS Systems Manager automates patching and other routine operations across fleets of instances.

  • A. Systems Manager applies patch baselines and runs commands across a fleet on a schedule, removing the manual work.
  • B. CloudTrail records API activity for audit and investigation; it performs no operational actions.
  • C. AWS Config records and evaluates configuration; remediation of patch level is not its job.
  • D. Inspector finds vulnerabilities that need fixing but does not install patches itself.

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