CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services practice questions

Cloud Technology and Services is 34% of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam, the heaviest of its 4 domains: roughly 17 of the 50 scored questions, and every 10% of accuracy here moves your scaled score about 34 points. Below are 8 free questions from this domain only, each with the answer explained and why every wrong option misses. Last updated 2026-07-19.

Every question is verified against official AWS documentation, linked below each answer.

  1. Question 1Cloud Technology and Services

    A company runs a small script that resizes images uploaded to a website. The script runs for only a few seconds, is triggered only when a new image is uploaded, and sometimes goes days without running at all. The company does not want to pay for idle compute capacity or manage servers.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: A. Use AWS Lambda to run the resizing code only when triggered by an upload, paying only for the compute time used

    Lambda is the serverless choice for short, event-triggered, intermittent workloads: it runs code only when triggered and bills only for the compute time consumed, with no servers to provision or manage.

    Go deeper: Why does an idle EC2 instance still cost money even when the script isn't running? What about this workload makes 'pay only when triggered' especially valuable?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  2. Question 2Cloud Technology and Services

    A research team is running a scientific application that performs heavy in-memory processing on very large datasets that must be held entirely in RAM, while CPU demand remains only moderate. They want to choose an EC2 instance family optimized for this workload.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: B. A memory-optimized instance family, chosen for a high ratio of RAM to vCPU

    Memory-optimized instance families provide a large amount of RAM relative to compute, which matches workloads that must hold big datasets entirely in memory, such as in-memory databases or real-time analytics.

    Go deeper: Why would a compute-optimized instance be the wrong fit for a dataset that must live entirely in RAM? What ratio of resources is characteristic of a memory-optimized instance family?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  3. Question 3Cloud Technology and Services

    A freelance web designer wants to launch a simple WordPress blog for a small business client. They want a pre-configured virtual server bundled with storage and networking at a low, predictable monthly price, without individually configuring compute, storage, and networking components.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: C. Amazon Lightsail, which bundles compute, storage, and networking into a simple, low-cost monthly plan

    Lightsail is built for exactly this scenario: simple virtual private servers bundled with storage and networking at a fixed, predictable monthly price, ideal for beginners and small projects like a single WordPress blog.

    Go deeper: Why is Elastic Beanstalk more complexity than this scenario actually needs? What three components does Lightsail bundle into a single predictable price?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  4. Question 4Cloud Technology and Services

    A developer has written a Java web application and wants to deploy it to AWS quickly by uploading the application code. They want AWS to automatically provision and manage the underlying EC2 instances, load balancer, and Auto Scaling group, without configuring each resource by hand.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: D. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which provisions and manages the underlying infrastructure automatically from uploaded application code

    Elastic Beanstalk is AWS's platform-as-a-service offering: developers upload application code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically provisions and manages the EC2 instances, load balancing, and scaling behind the scenes.

    Go deeper: What infrastructure pieces does Elastic Beanstalk provision for you automatically? Why wouldn't Route 53 or Direct Connect solve the developer's actual problem?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  5. Question 5Cloud Technology and Services

    A company wants to run containerized microservices on AWS but does not want to provision, patch, or scale the underlying EC2 servers that would normally host the container cluster. They still want AWS to handle scheduling and orchestrating their containers.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: A. Run containers on AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers that removes the need to manage EC2 instances

    Fargate is the serverless compute engine available for both ECS and EKS that removes the need to provision, patch, or manage EC2 instances for a container cluster, letting AWS handle the underlying compute while the customer focuses on containers.

    Go deeper: What's the difference between running ECS on Fargate versus ECS on the EC2 launch type? Why does 'still requires provisioning EC2' rule out two of these options?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  6. Question 6Cloud Technology and Services

    A retail website experiences unpredictable spikes in traffic during flash sales, followed by long stretches of low traffic. The company wants the number of running EC2 instances to automatically increase during spikes and decrease afterward, without manual intervention.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: B. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, which automatically adjusts the number of instances based on demand

    EC2 Auto Scaling is designed to automatically add or remove EC2 instances in response to changing demand, matching compute capacity to load without requiring manual intervention, which directly addresses the flash-sale traffic pattern.

    Go deeper: Why doesn't Route 53 or Direct Connect solve a compute-capacity problem like this one? What triggers EC2 Auto Scaling to add or remove instances?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  7. Question 7Cloud Technology and Services

    A company runs a web application across multiple EC2 instances spread over two Availability Zones for high availability. They need incoming traffic to be automatically distributed across all healthy instances so no single instance becomes overloaded and traffic avoids unhealthy instances.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: C. Elastic Load Balancing, which distributes incoming traffic across multiple instances and Availability Zones

    Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, spanning one or more Availability Zones, and routes traffic away from instances that fail health checks.

    Go deeper: How does a load balancer decide to stop sending traffic to an unhealthy instance? Why is EBS Multi-Attach unrelated to distributing incoming traffic?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

  8. Question 8Cloud Technology and Services

    A media company needs to store an ever-growing archive of video files, potentially reaching petabytes over time, with extremely high durability so files are virtually never lost, and without pre-provisioning a fixed amount of storage capacity in advance.

    Reveal answer & explanation

    Answer: D. Amazon S3, an object storage service designed for virtually unlimited scale and 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability

    S3 is purpose-built object storage that scales to any amount of data automatically and is engineered for 11 nines of durability, with no need to pre-provision capacity, matching the archival growth requirement exactly.

    Go deeper: Why is EBS a poor fit for a dataset that keeps growing unpredictably over time? What does '11 nines of durability' mean for an archive like this one?

    Source: official AWS documentation · verified 2026-07-19

More CLF-C02 practice