CLF-C02 Practice Test 47 — 15 Questions

Question 1

A company runs a web application on AWS that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes. The company wants to configure its infrastructure to automatically increase compute capacity during peak times and decrease it during low traffic, minimizing costs. Which cloud computing concept does this scenario BEST represent?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

Elasticity. Elasticity is the ability of a cloud system to automatically provision and de-provision compute resources in response to real-time demand. In this scenario, AWS Auto Scaling groups can dynamically launch EC2 instances during traffic spikes and terminate them when demand drops, directly matching capacity to load while minimizing cost. This contrasts with static provisioning, which would either over-provision (wasting money) or under-provision (causing outages).

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High availability

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Fault tolerance

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Vertical scaling

Question 2

A company has multiple AWS accounts consolidated under AWS Organizations. The finance team wants to set a hard monthly cost limit for a development account. If the forecasted costs for the month exceed that limit, the team wants AWS to automatically stop all non-critical Amazon EC2 instances in that account to prevent overspending. The team also needs to receive an email alert when the cost threshold is first crossed. Which AWS service or feature should the team use to define the budget and configure the automated action?

Accepted Answer

AWS Budgets with an Amazon EC2 action. AWS Budgets allows you to set a cost budget with a threshold and, when forecasted costs exceed that threshold, trigger an AWS Budgets action to stop specific Amazon EC2 instances. This meets the requirement for a hard monthly cost limit and automated instance stoppage, while also sending an email alert via Amazon SNS when the threshold is first crossed.

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AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Trusted Advisor

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AWS Organizations

Question 3

Which cloud computing characteristic allows a company to pay only for the compute resources they actually use, without upfront commitments?

Accepted Answer

Pay-as-you-go pricing. Pay-as-you-go pricing is the cloud computing characteristic that enables a company to pay only for the compute resources they actually consume, with no upfront commitments or long-term contracts. This model aligns costs directly with usage, allowing organizations to avoid capital expenditure and scale spending based on demand. AWS implements this through services like EC2 On-Demand instances, where billing is per second (or per hour) with no minimum purchase required.

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High availability

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Elasticity

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Economies of scale

Question 4

A company has a monthly budget of $10,000 for its development AWS account. The project manager wants to receive an automated email alert when the actual costs for the current month reach 80% of the budget. The project manager does not want to build any custom code or manage any infrastructure for this alert. Which approach should the project manager take to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a budget in AWS Budgets for the account, set the budget amount to $10,000, configure an alert for actual cost at 80% of the budget amount, and specify an email address to receive the notification.. AWS Budgets allows you to set a monthly budget of $10,000 and configure an alert to trigger when actual costs reach 80% ($8,000). The alert can send an email notification directly without requiring any custom code or infrastructure management, meeting the project manager's requirements exactly.

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Create a cost allocation tag in the Billing and Cost Management console, then configure an Amazon SNS topic to send an email when the tag's cost reaches $8,000.

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Create a usage report in AWS Cost Explorer, set a forecast alert at 80% of the monthly budget, and configure the report to be sent via email.

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Create an AWS Lambda function that queries the AWS Cost Explorer API daily, compares actual cost to the budget, and sends an email if costs exceed $8,000.

Question 5

Which AWS service is a fully managed data warehousing service optimized for online analytical processing (OLAP) of large datasets?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service designed specifically for online analytical processing (OLAP) of large datasets. It uses columnar storage, massively parallel processing (MPP), and data compression to deliver fast query performance on structured and semi-structured data, making it the correct choice for OLAP workloads.

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Amazon RDS

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Amazon DynamoDB

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Amazon Aurora

Question 6

A company is using Amazon EC2 and wants to understand the difference between Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans. Which statement is accurate?

Accepted Answer

Compute Savings Plans apply to any EC2 instance, Fargate, and Lambda usage, while EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to a specific instance family and region. Compute Savings Plans offer the broadest flexibility, automatically applying to any EC2 instance (regardless of family, size, or region), as well as AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage. In contrast, EC2 Instance Savings Plans are restricted to a specific instance family within a chosen region, providing a narrower scope of coverage. This distinction is fundamental to understanding how each plan optimizes costs based on workload flexibility.

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Compute Savings Plans provide higher discounts than EC2 Instance Savings Plans

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EC2 Instance Savings Plans are more flexible and apply across all instance families

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Both Savings Plans types require specifying the exact instance size at purchase

Question 7

A company is migrating a business-critical workload to AWS. The company wants to ensure it has access to a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) who will provide proactive guidance, architectural reviews, and operational support. Additionally, the company requires the Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) service to assist with the migration launch, and it wants the full set of AWS Trusted Advisor best practice checks across all categories (cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits). Which AWS Support plan should the company select?

Accepted Answer

AWS Enterprise Support. AWS Enterprise Support is the only plan that provides a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM) for proactive guidance, architectural reviews, and operational support. It also includes Infrastructure Event Management (IEM) for migration launches and full access to all AWS Trusted Advisor best practice checks across all categories, including cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, and service limits. Lower-tier plans lack one or more of these critical features.

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AWS Basic Support

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AWS Developer Support

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AWS Business Support

Question 8

A company is building a data lake on AWS. Which AWS service provides a serverless interactive query service that allows analysts to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL?

Accepted Answer

Amazon Athena. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables analysts to query data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. It requires no infrastructure management, as Athena automatically scales and executes queries directly against data in S3, making it the ideal choice for ad-hoc analysis on a data lake.

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Amazon Redshift

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Amazon EMR

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AWS Glue

Question 9

A company is planning to migrate a legacy application to AWS. The solutions architect needs to estimate the monthly cost of running Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS databases, and Amazon S3 storage. The architect wants to compare different instance types, storage classes, and pricing models (e.g., On-Demand vs. Reserved Instances) to find the most cost-effective configuration. The team requires a tool that provides a detailed, itemized cost estimate without incurring any actual charges, and allows saving and sharing the estimate with stakeholders. Which AWS tool should the solutions architect use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Pricing Calculator. The AWS Pricing Calculator (formerly AWS Simple Monthly Calculator) is the correct tool because it allows users to build a detailed, itemized cost estimate for AWS services like EC2, RDS, and S3 without incurring any actual charges. It supports comparing different instance types, storage classes, and pricing models (On-Demand vs. Reserved Instances), and provides a shareable link to save and share the estimate with stakeholders.

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AWS Budgets

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AWS Cost Explorer

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AWS Cost and Usage Report

Question 10

Which statement correctly describes the difference between horizontal scaling and vertical scaling in cloud computing?

Accepted Answer

Horizontal scaling adds more instances; vertical scaling increases the size of existing instances. Horizontal scaling (scaling out) involves adding more instances of a resource, such as EC2 instances, to distribute the load, while vertical scaling (scaling up) increases the size or capacity of an existing instance, for example by moving from a t2.micro to a t2.large. This distinction is fundamental in AWS cloud architectures, where horizontal scaling improves fault tolerance and availability, and vertical scaling is limited by the maximum instance size.

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Horizontal scaling means increasing instance size; vertical scaling means adding more instances

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Both scaling types produce identical results and are interchangeable in cloud architectures

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Vertical scaling is always preferred because it reduces the number of instances to manage

Question 11

Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, what is AWS responsible for when a customer uses AWS Lambda?

Accepted Answer

Managing the underlying OS, runtime, and execution environment. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service where AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, including the operating system, runtime environment, and execution environment. Under the Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, which for Lambda includes patching the runtime, managing the hypervisor, and ensuring the execution environment is isolated between customers. The customer is only responsible for the code and configuration they provide.

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Writing the Lambda function code

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Configuring IAM roles and permissions for Lambda functions

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Encrypting the data processed by the function

Question 12

Drag and drop the steps to set up CloudFront with an S3 origin in the correct order.

Accepted Answer

1. Prepare the S3 bucket for static website hosting. 2. Create a CloudFront distribution. 3. Configure the origin settings to point to the S3 bucket. 4. Update DNS to point to the CloudFront distribution.. CloudFront with S3: prepare S3, create distribution, configure origin, and update DNS.

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1. Create a CloudFront distribution. 2. Prepare the S3 bucket for static website hosting. 3. Configure the origin settings to point to the S3 bucket. 4. Update DNS to point to the CloudFront distribution.

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1. Prepare the S3 bucket for static website hosting. 2. Configure the origin settings to point to the S3 bucket. 3. Create a CloudFront distribution. 4. Update DNS to point to the CloudFront distribution.

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1. Update DNS to point to the CloudFront distribution. 2. Prepare the S3 bucket for static website hosting. 3. Create a CloudFront distribution. 4. Configure the origin settings to point to the S3 bucket.

Question 13

A company needs to send transactional emails such as order confirmations and password resets at scale. Which AWS service should they use?

Accepted Answer

Amazon SES. Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is specifically designed for sending high-volume transactional and marketing emails, such as order confirmations and password resets. It provides reliable delivery with built-in feedback loops, bounce handling, and dedicated IP management, making it the correct choice for this use case.

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Amazon SNS

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Amazon SQS

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Amazon Pinpoint

Question 14

A development team is building a serverless image processing application. When a user uploads an image to Amazon S3, the application must perform three sequential steps: first, resize the image; second, generate a thumbnail; third, store metadata in Amazon DynamoDB. The team wants to define this workflow as a visual state machine, handle errors with retries, and manage the execution flow without writing custom orchestration code. Which AWS service should the team use?

Accepted Answer

AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions is the correct choice because it allows you to define a visual state machine that orchestrates three sequential steps (resize, thumbnail, metadata storage) without writing custom orchestration code. It natively supports error handling with retries and manages execution flow, making it ideal for serverless workflows that require coordination across multiple AWS services like Lambda and DynamoDB.

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

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Amazon EventBridge

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AWS Lambda

Question 15

A company has 10 EC2 On-Demand instances running. They purchase a 1-year Compute Savings Plan for a commitment equivalent to 6 instances. What happens to the remaining 4 instances' cost?

Accepted Answer

The remaining 4 instances are charged at On-Demand rates. A Compute Savings Plan applies to any EC2 instance usage up to the committed hourly amount (in this case, equivalent to 6 instances). Usage beyond that commitment is charged at standard On-Demand rates. Therefore, the remaining 4 instances are billed at On-Demand prices because the Savings Plan does not cover usage exceeding the commitment.

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The remaining 4 instances are free since the Savings Plan covers all usage

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The remaining 4 instances are charged at Spot Instance rates

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AWS suspends the 4 excess instances to enforce the Savings Plan limit