CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company needs to run scheduled jobs that execute SQL queries on their Amazon RDS database every night. Which AWS service provides fully managed job scheduling without maintaining dedicated compute resources?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse 'fully managed job scheduling' with services like EC2 cron jobs or ECS scheduled tasks, overlooking that EventBridge Scheduler is the only option that requires zero compute resource management for this specific use case.
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
✓
AWS Lambda triggered by Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
AWS Lambda triggered by Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is the correct choice because EventBridge Scheduler provides fully managed, serverless job scheduling that can invoke Lambda functions to execute SQL queries on Amazon RDS. This eliminates the need to provision or maintain any dedicated compute resources, as the scheduling and execution are handled entirely by AWS.
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 with cron jobs
Why it's wrong here
Running a daily database query on an EC2 instance with cron requires that instance to be powered on 24/7, waiting for the cron trigger. This means you are paying for a full EC2 instance (compute, memory, and EBS root volume) even during the 23.9 hours when the job isn't running. While you could use Instance Scheduler or a Lambda-based stop/start to reduce costs, that adds complexity and still incurs minimum hourly billing. For a single daily task, this is a wasteful, over-provisioned approach compared to serverless execution.
- ✓
AWS Lambda triggered by Amazon EventBridge Scheduler
Why this is correct
AWS Lambda integrates natively with Amazon EventBridge Scheduler, which can invoke the function on a fixed schedule (e.g., once daily) without any persistent compute running. Lambda spins up the execution environment only when the event fires, runs the database query, and then shuts down, so you pay only for the milliseconds of compute during the actual invocation. This serverless model perfectly matches the sporadic, short-running nature of a daily batch query and eliminates idle cost. Additionally, Lambda connections to a database can use RDS Proxy or a private VPC setting to manage short-lived connections efficiently.
- ✗
Amazon ECS with scheduled tasks
Why it's wrong here
Amazon ECS scheduled tasks are an alternative to Lambda for running containers on a schedule, but they require you to provision and maintain an ECS cluster (using Fargate or EC2) and define a task definition with container images. Even with Fargate, each scheduled task incurs a minimum billing duration (typically 1 minute), and you must handle image registry, task role, and EventBridge target setup. For a simple database query that needs no custom container environment, ECS adds operational overhead—such as managing image versions and cluster scaling—without any benefit. Lambda is the lighter-weight, lower-ops choice for this exact use case.
- ✗
AWS OpsWorks
Why it's wrong here
AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service based on Chef and Puppet, designed for automating the setup, patching, and deployment of EC2 instances or on-premises servers, not for scheduling one-off jobs. It uses lifecycle events (setup, configure, deploy, shutdown) to run recipes on instances, but it does not have a built-in calendar-based scheduler to trigger a single daily database query. To use OpsWorks for this task, you would still need to combine it with another scheduler (like cron or EventBridge) and maintain a Chef/Puppet server, which is completely overkill. As a job scheduling solution, it is technically inappropriate and has no serverless invocation model.
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.