CLF-C02 Cloud Technology and Services Practice Question
A company runs containerised microservices using Amazon ECS. The operations team wants to stop managing EC2 instances, including patching and capacity planning for the container hosts. Which option allows them to run containers on ECS without managing servers?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers confuse the pricing model (Reserved Instances) with the compute management model, or they think Lambda can fully replace ECS for containerised microservices, not realising Fargate is the serverless compute option specifically designed for ECS.
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
✓
Use AWS Fargate as the ECS launch type
AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS. When you use Fargate as the launch type, you no longer need to provision, patch, or manage EC2 instances; AWS handles the underlying infrastructure, including capacity planning and OS patching. This directly meets the operations team's requirement to stop managing servers.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Run ECS tasks on On-Demand EC2 instances
Why it's wrong here
With the EC2 launch type, ECS schedules tasks on EC2 instances that your account owns and operates. Choosing On-Demand instances means you are responsible for provisioning capacity, applying OS patches, handling instance failures, and scaling the host fleet yourself. This keeps the server management that the team explicitly wants to eliminate, so it fails the requirement.
- ✓
Use AWS Fargate as the ECS launch type
Why this is correct
AWS Fargate is the serverless compute engine for ECS, letting you run containers without managing any EC2 instances. You simply define the task and specify vCPU and memory requirements, and Fargate provisions the underlying hosts, applies security patches, and isolates each task automatically. This removes the server management burden entirely, making it the correct launch type for the team's goal.
- ✗
Use AWS Lambda to run the containers
Why it's wrong here
Lambda is designed for event-driven functions, not as a general-purpose container orchestrator. While Lambda can load code from container images for custom runtimes, it still executes a single stateless function invocation, not a long-running containerized application with service semantics. Unlike ECS, it lacks the native concepts of task definitions, service auto-scaling, and load-balanced container instances, so it is the wrong tool for this scenario.
- ✗
Run ECS tasks on Reserved EC2 instances
Why it's wrong here
Reserved Instances are a billing discount mechanism for EC2 usage, not a distinct deployment model. Even if you prepay or commit to compute, the team still has to launch, patch, and maintain the EC2 instances that serve as the ECS container host cluster. The reservation only reduces hourly cost; it does nothing to remove the operational burden of managing servers.
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 |
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This CLF-C02 question is part of Courseiva's 988-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.