CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question
A development team wants to deploy a Python web application to AWS without managing load balancers, auto scaling groups, or the underlying EC2 instance operating systems. They want to upload their code and have AWS handle the infrastructure. Which cloud service model does this represent?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse Serverless (Option D) with PaaS because both abstract infrastructure, but Serverless is specifically event-driven and stateless (e.g., AWS Lambda), whereas PaaS like Elastic Beanstalk runs a long-lived web application with traditional request-response patterns.
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
✓
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a managed platform where developers can upload code and AWS handles the underlying infrastructure, including load balancing, auto scaling, and OS patching. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS service that abstracts EC2 instances, load balancers, and auto scaling groups, allowing the team to focus solely on their Python web application code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Why it's wrong here
Infrastructure as a Service, such as raw Amazon EC2, supplies only virtualized compute, storage, and networking, leaving the customer to install the OS, middleware, runtime, and configure scaling and load balancing. With Elastic Beanstalk, AWS automatically handles the OS patches, capacity provisioning, and load balancing, so the customer is removed from that infrastructure-layer management. The service operates above the IaaS level because it abstracts away those tasks.
- ✓
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Why this is correct
With AWS Elastic Beanstalk, a developer uploads application code and AWS automatically provisions and manages the underlying EC2 instances, load balancers, auto-scaling groups, and OS patching. This abstraction of infrastructure management while retaining control over the application configuration is the defining trait of Platform as a Service. The team remains responsible only for the code and deployment artifacts, not the servers themselves.
- ✗
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Why it's wrong here
Software as a Service delivers a fully managed, ready-to-use end-user application such as email or CRM over the internet from a vendor like Salesforce. Elastic Beanstalk is not a vendor-provided application; the team builds and deploys its own custom workload on AWS infrastructure. Since the software itself is developed by the customer rather than provided as a service, this does not qualify as SaaS.
- ✗
Serverless
Why it's wrong here
Serverless computing, exemplified by AWS Lambda, is event-driven and runs individual functions in short-lived containers with no persistent server infrastructure and no continuous instance billing. Elastic Beanstalk, by contrast, runs a long-lived environment backed by EC2 instances that AWS manages for you; servers still exist even though you do not see them. The presence of those managed servers, rather than on-demand function execution, means it is not serverless.
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