- A
Economies of scale
Why wrong: Economies of scale refers to lower costs achieved through AWS's aggregate purchasing power. Multi-AZ deployment for availability is a different benefit.
- B
On-demand self-service
Why wrong: On-demand self-service is about provisioning resources without contacting the provider. Multi-AZ resilience demonstrates high availability.
- C
High availability and fault tolerance
Deploying across multiple AZs with automatic load balancing failover provides high availability — the system continues to function when one AZ fails. Cloud infrastructure makes this achievable without expensive duplicate on-premises data centres.
- D
Rapid elasticity
Why wrong: Rapid elasticity is about scaling resources up and down quickly to meet demand. Multi-AZ deployment for fault tolerance is about high availability.
CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question
This CLF-C02 practice question tests your understanding of cloud concepts. The scenario asks you to isolate a root cause — eliminate options that address a different problem before choosing. After answering, compare your reasoning against the explanation and wrong-answer breakdown below. Once you have made your selection, read the full explanation to reinforce the concept and understand why each distractor is designed to mislead on exam day.
A company deploys their web application across two Availability Zones using an Application Load Balancer. If one AZ experiences an outage, traffic is automatically routed to the other AZ and the application continues to function. Which cloud benefit does this demonstrate?
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
High availability and fault tolerance
This scenario demonstrates high availability and fault tolerance because the application is deployed across two Availability Zones with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributing traffic. If one AZ fails, the ALB automatically reroutes traffic to the healthy AZ, ensuring continuous operation. This design eliminates a single point of failure and maintains service availability, which is the core of fault tolerance in AWS.
Key principle: Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
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 lower costs achieved through AWS's aggregate purchasing power. Multi-AZ deployment for availability is a different benefit.
- ✗
On-demand self-service
Why it's wrong here
On-demand self-service is about provisioning resources without contacting the provider. Multi-AZ resilience demonstrates high availability.
- ✓
High availability and fault tolerance
Why this is correct
Deploying across multiple AZs with automatic load balancing failover provides high availability — the system continues to function when one AZ fails. Cloud infrastructure makes this achievable without expensive duplicate on-premises data centres.
Related concept
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- ✗
Rapid elasticity
Why it's wrong here
Rapid elasticity is about scaling resources up and down quickly to meet demand. Multi-AZ deployment for fault tolerance is about high availability.
Common exam traps
Common exam trap: answer the scenario, not the keyword
The trap here is that candidates confuse high availability/fault tolerance with rapid elasticity, because both involve automatic responses to changing conditions, but elasticity handles scaling capacity while fault tolerance handles failure recovery.
Detailed technical explanation
How to think about this question
Under the hood, the ALB uses health checks (HTTP/HTTPS or TCP) against targets in each AZ to determine availability; if health checks fail for all targets in one AZ, the ALB marks that AZ as unhealthy and stops routing traffic to it. This behavior is governed by the cross-zone load balancing feature, which is enabled by default for ALBs, and the ALB's DNS name resolves to multiple IP addresses (one per AZ), allowing clients to connect to healthy endpoints. In a real-world scenario, this design is critical for meeting SLAs like 99.99% uptime, as it protects against single-AZ failures caused by power outages or network issues.
KKey Concepts to Remember
- Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
- Find the constraint that changes the correct option.
- Eliminate answers that are true in general but not in this case.
TExam Day Tips
- Watch for words such as best, first, most likely and least administrative effort.
- Review why wrong options are wrong, not only why the correct option is correct.
Key takeaway
Answer the scenario, not the keyword: identify the specific constraint before choosing the most familiar-sounding option.
Real-world example
How this comes up in practice
An e-commerce site experiences heavy traffic on Black Friday and near-zero traffic during off-peak weeks. Rather than provisioning permanent large VMs, the team uses auto-scaling groups that add capacity automatically under load and reduce it overnight. Questions like this test whether you understand elasticity, availability zones, and cloud compute scaling patterns.
What to study next
Got this wrong? Here's your next step.
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
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Cloud Concepts — study guide chapter
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FAQ
Questions learners often ask
What does this CLF-C02 question test?
Cloud Concepts — This question tests Cloud Concepts — Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer..
What is the correct answer to this question?
The correct answer is: High availability and fault tolerance — This scenario demonstrates high availability and fault tolerance because the application is deployed across two Availability Zones with an Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributing traffic. If one AZ fails, the ALB automatically reroutes traffic to the healthy AZ, ensuring continuous operation. This design eliminates a single point of failure and maintains service availability, which is the core of fault tolerance in AWS.
What should I do if I get this CLF-C02 question wrong?
Identify which exam domain this question belongs to, review the core concept, then practise similar questions from the same domain.
What is the key concept behind this question?
Read the scenario before looking for a memorised answer.
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Last reviewed: Jun 11, 2026
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.
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