CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A company currently owns and operates its own data center. They are considering moving to AWS. Which economic benefit describes the elimination of the costs associated with purchasing, maintaining, and cooling physical servers?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse 'economies of scale' (a broad pricing benefit) with the specific elimination of data center operational costs, leading them to incorrectly select option A.
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
✓
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
Moving to AWS eliminates the capital and operational expenses associated with owning and operating physical servers, including procurement, maintenance, cooling, and facility management. This aligns with the AWS value proposition of shifting from a capital expenditure (CapEx) model to an operational expenditure (OpEx) model, where customers pay only for the resources they consume.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Economies of scale
Why it's wrong here
Economies of scale refers to AWS's ability to aggregate demand across millions of customers, enabling lower per-unit costs for compute, storage, and bandwidth. While this reduces AWS's cost base and lets customers benefit from lower prices, it does not directly eliminate the operational burden of running physical data centers. The benefit here is financial leverage on purchased services, not the removal of capital-intensive infrastructure management that a customer would otherwise perform.
- ✓
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
Why this is correct
Moving to AWS lets a company decommission its own physical servers, storage arrays, cooling systems, UPS units, generators, and onsite IT staff, thereby converting fixed capital expenditure and ongoing operating cost into variable, usage-based pricing. This directly addresses the question's focus on reducing the cost of running and maintaining data centers, because AWS assumes responsibility for facility upkeep, hardware lifecycle, power, and physical security. By eliminating these costs, the customer can redirect budget toward application development and business growth, which is the exact benefit the correct answer describes.
- ✗
Go global in minutes
Why it's wrong here
Going global in minutes is about geographic expansion: with AWS Regions and Edge locations, a customer can replicate infrastructure and deploy workloads in new countries quickly, reducing latency and complying with local data residency requirements. This capability is a speed or agility benefit, not a cost-saving mechanism for existing data centers. Although it may reduce the need to build new data centers, it does not eliminate the cost of running legacy infrastructure already in operation.
- ✗
Increase speed and agility
Why it's wrong here
Increase speed and agility means that developers can provision resources in seconds via APIs, enabling rapid experimentation, iterative development, and faster time-to-market for features. This benefit focuses on reducing the time to innovate and respond to changing business needs, not on cutting operational costs from physical data center ownership. The ability to spin up and tear down environments quickly does not, by itself, remove the ongoing costs of power, cooling, and staffing that are central to the correct answer.
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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.