CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

• ✗

  Software licensing costs always decrease when moving to AWS

  Why it's wrong here

  Software licensing costs are not automatically reduced on AWS; bringing existing on-premises enterprise licenses (BYOL) requires careful review of license mobility, and some software vendors require dedicated hosts or specific AWS offerings to remain compliant. Commercial agreements such as Microsoft or Oracle licenses often have specific rules for shared tenancy, and migrations may force re-architecting or purchasing new licensing models from the AWS Marketplace. As a result, licensing costs can stay flat or even rise, so the statement that they 'always decrease' is factually incorrect.

• ✓

  Physical hardware, data center facilities, and infrastructure management costs

  Why this is correct

  AWS operates hyper-scale data centers that replace a customer's on-premises physical hardware, facility space, power and cooling, and the staffing overhead required to rack, stack, and maintain servers. By migrating, customers shift from large capital expenditures (Capex) for hardware procurement to variable operational expenses (Opex) based on consumption, and AWS's massive procurement volume lowers per-unit infrastructure costs. This is the primary financial benefit of cloud, because customers no longer pay for idle capacity or the full lifecycle cost of their own physical data center equipment.

• ✗

  Developer salaries and application development costs

  Why it's wrong here

  Developer compensation and application engineering efforts remain after migration because AWS does not write, deploy, or maintain a customer's application code; the customer still needs a full software engineering team to build, test, and iterate on business logic. In many cases, teams require additional training and AWS certification to acquire cloud-specific skills, which can raise short-term costs instead of eliminating them. This option is incorrect because it represents human capital and application development expenses, which are not part of the physical infrastructure costs AWS replaces.

• ✗

  Data transfer costs are eliminated in the cloud

  Why it's wrong here

  AWS does not eliminate data transfer costs; inbound data into AWS is generally free, but outbound (egress) traffic to the internet is billed per gigabyte, and inter-VPC or cross-region traffic can also incur charges. While on-premises networks may bundle internal traffic costs into hardware and WAN contracts, cloud users see egress as a discrete line item, so the cost may appear new rather than disappear. Therefore, claiming that data transfer costs are eliminated in the cloud is false because AWS explicitly prices network traffic and charges customers based on usage.

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