CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A developer wants to build a serverless application that responds to HTTP requests. Which combination of AWS services would be most appropriate?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'serverless' with 'managed services' and choose options like ECS with Fargate or Elastic Beanstalk, which still involve underlying compute management, whereas the correct answer requires a fully event-driven, no-server model with API Gateway and Lambda.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda
Amazon API Gateway acts as a fully managed HTTP endpoint that receives and routes incoming requests to AWS Lambda functions, which execute the application logic without provisioning servers. This combination directly fulfills the requirement for a serverless application that responds to HTTP requests, as Lambda handles compute in a stateless, event-driven manner and API Gateway provides the HTTP interface with built-in features like throttling, authentication, and request validation.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing
Why it's wrong here
Amazon EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing still requires you to select instance types, manage security groups, patch the guest OS, and handle scaling capacity even if you add an Auto Scaling group. ELB only distributes incoming traffic to those EC2 instances; it does not remove the need to operate servers. This makes it infrastructure-as-a-service, not a serverless architecture.
- ✗
Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
Why it's wrong here
Amazon ECS with AWS Fargate avoids EC2 instance management by running containers on a serverless compute engine, but you must still define task definitions, choose container images, and manage the ECS cluster's application deployment. Fargate does not provide a built-in HTTP API layer, and it bills per vCPU and memory rather than per request. The canonical serverless HTTP API pattern pairs a managed API front-end with Lambda functions.
- ✓
Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda
Why this is correct
Amazon API Gateway provides a fully managed HTTP API endpoint with routing, authentication, rate limiting, and request validation, then invokes AWS Lambda to execute business logic without provisioning any servers. Lambda scales automatically with each request, runs code in a stateless environment, and charges only for compute time consumed during execution. This combination is the standard serverless architecture for building HTTP-based APIs on AWS.
- ✗
AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon RDS
Why it's wrong here
AWS Elastic Beanstalk simplifies deploying applications by automatically managing capacity, load balancing, and health monitoring, but it still provisions and runs EC2 instances under the hood, so it is a PaaS rather than truly serverless. Amazon RDS is a managed database service, yet it runs on dedicated DB instances that you must right-size and maintain patching windows for. Neither component follows the pay-per-use, no-infrastructure model of serverless computing.
Quick reference
Cloud Service Model Comparison
| Model | You Manage | Provider Manages | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| IaaS | OS, runtime, apps, data | Hardware, hypervisor, networking | EC2, Azure VMs, GCP Compute Engine |
| PaaS | Apps and data | OS, runtime, middleware, hardware | Elastic Beanstalk, Azure App Service |
| SaaS | Data and settings only | Everything else | Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Workday |
| FaaS / Serverless | Function code only | Infra, scaling, runtime | Lambda, Azure Functions, Cloud Run |
| CaaS | Containers and apps | Kubernetes, OS, hardware | EKS, AKS, GKE |
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CLF-C02 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Amazon Web Services certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CLF-C02 exam.