Try 10 Real Questions From AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) - 750 Practice Exam Questions & Detailed Explanations (2026 Edition)
These are unedited questions from the full 750-question set, pulled from across every exam domain. Click a question to reveal the answer and the full rationale for every option, exactly as it appears in the PDF.
A company moves from an on-premises data center to AWS and now pays for compute by the hour instead of purchasing servers upfront. Which cloud financial benefit does this illustrate?
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A: "Massive economies of scale" refers to AWS passing on cost savings from bulk purchasing; it does not directly describe the change from owning servers to renting them hourly.
B: "Increase speed and agility" is about provisioning resources quickly, not the financial shift from CapEx to OpEx.
C: "Stop guessing capacity" means no longer needing to predict server needs; it's about scaling, not the payment model.
D (Correct): Trading capital expense (CapEx) for variable expense (OpEx) describes the shift from large upfront hardware investments to pay-as-you-go, consumption-based pricing.
An e-commerce website automatically adds more EC2 instances during flash sales and removes them afterwards. Which cloud characteristic is being demonstrated?
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A: High availability ensures a system is reachable and operational despite failures, not that it scales with demand.
B: Disaster recovery is the ability to restore operations after a catastrophic event (like a region outage), not daily traffic spikes.
C: Fault tolerance means a system continues to function even if one or more components fail; it does not relate to demand-driven scaling.
D (Correct): Elasticity is the ability to scale resources in and out dynamically based on demand, matching capacity to load.
According to the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, which of the following is a responsibility of AWS for Amazon EC2?
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A: Patching the guest OS is the customer's responsibility -- this falls under "security in the cloud" for IaaS.
B: Configuring security groups is a customer responsibility; AWS provides the feature, but the customer defines the rules.
C (Correct): AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes the physical data centre, hardware, and the hypervisor that runs EC2 instances.
D: Managing IAM users and their permissions is entirely the customer's responsibility.
An organisation requires you to centrally manage permissions for multiple AWS accounts using policies that limit what services and actions are allowed. What is the appropriate AWS service?
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A: IAM manages permissions within a single account; it does not provide cross-account policy enforcement.
B: AWS Config monitors and records resource configurations, not permission boundaries.
C (Correct): AWS Organizations allows you to attach SCPs to organizational units or accounts, which serve as guardrails for what actions are permitted.
D: GuardDuty is a threat detection service.
A developer needs temporary, limited-privilege credentials for an application running on an EC2 instance to access DynamoDB. What is the most secure way to grant this access?
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A: Storing access keys in code is a security risk and violates best practices.
B: Embedding long-lived keys in files risks exposure and lacks automatic rotation.
C: The root user should never be used for everyday tasks; it has unrestricted access.
D (Correct): An IAM role provides temporary credentials that automatically rotate and are scoped to only the permissions the application needs.
A development team wants a highly scalable, durable object storage service to store static assets like images and videos for its website. Which AWS offering is the correct choice?
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A: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block-level storage for EC2 instances, not object storage for web assets.
B: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is a shared file system, not an object storage service for static website assets.
C (Correct): Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an object storage service with 99.999999999% durability, ideal for static files like media.
D: Amazon RDS is a managed relational database service, not a storage service for files.
An organisation requires a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse for running complex analytic queries. What is the appropriate AWS service?
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A: RDS is for online transaction processing (OLTP), not analytical data warehousing.
B: DynamoDB is a NoSQL key-value/document database.
C (Correct): Amazon Redshift is a columnar data warehouse designed for OLAP queries on large datasets.
D: S3 is object storage, not a data warehouse.
A DevOps engineer is asked to find a fully managed, MySQL-compatible relational database with high performance and automatic storage scaling. Which service addresses this?
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A: DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, not relational.
B (Correct): Amazon Aurora is a cloud-optimized relational database compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, with auto-scaling storage up to 128 TB.
C: Redshift is a data warehouse.
D: Neptune is a graph database.
A startup's engineering team needs to pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitment. Which pricing model should it use?
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A: Reserved Instances require a 1- or 3-year term.
B: Savings Plans require a commitment to a specific dollar-per-hour spend.
C (Correct): On-Demand pricing charges for compute capacity per hour or per second with no upfront fees and no commitment.
D: Spot Instances offer spare capacity at a discount but can be interrupted and are not the standard pay-per-hour option with no risk of interruption.
Which tool should a customer use to estimate the monthly cost of a planned AWS deployment before any resources are launched?
Show answer & full rationale
A: Cost Explorer shows past and current costs, not pre-launch estimates.
B: Budgets sets spending thresholds and alerts.
C (Correct): The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you model your architecture and get a detailed estimate.
D: The TCO Calculator compares on-premises to AWS, not a specific planned architecture.
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