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CLF-C02 Cloud Concepts Practice Question
Match each AWS service to its primary category.
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
✓
Amazon EC2: Compute
AWS services are categorized by their primary function. Amazon EC2 is compute, S3 is storage, RDS is database, and VPC is networking. Common confusions include mixing storage and compute categories.
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: Compute
Why this is correct
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) falls squarely under Compute because it provisions resizable virtual servers, known as instances, on which customers run their own operating systems and applications. It offers raw CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources that you manage, making it the core Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering for general-purpose processing. This directly aligns EC2 with compute as its primary service category.
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Amazon S3: Compute
Why it's wrong here
Amazon S3 is fundamentally an object storage service that stores and retrieves any amount of data from anywhere via a simple API, not a compute platform. While S3 can serve static website content or trigger AWS Lambda functions for event-driven processing, the compute element in those scenarios comes from Lambda, not from S3 itself. Classifying S3 as Compute confuses the data storage layer with the processing layer, so the correct category for S3 is Storage.
- ✓
Amazon RDS: Database
Why this is correct
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a managed database service that automatically handles time-consuming administrative tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, and failover for several relational database engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. It gives you a pre-configured, self-healing database endpoint rather than requiring you to install and operate the database on virtual machines, which clearly places it in the Database category. This separates database management from compute resources, making RDS a database service rather than a compute or storage service.
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Amazon VPC: Database
Why it's wrong here
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) is a networking service that lets you define an isolated virtual network within the AWS cloud, controlling IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and internet gateways. Databases like RDS run inside a VPC, but the VPC itself provides no database engine or data-management functionality—it simply creates the logical network boundary. Therefore labeling VPC as Database misidentifies the network infrastructure layer as a data layer; its true category is Networking and Content Delivery.
Quick reference
AWS S3 Storage Class Comparison
| Storage Class | Min Duration | Retrieval | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | None | Immediate | Frequently accessed data |
| S3 Standard-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Infrequent access, rapid retrieval |
| S3 One Zone-IA | 30 days | Immediate | Non-critical infrequent data |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering | None | Immediate–hours | Unknown or changing access patterns |
| S3 Glacier Instant | 90 days | Milliseconds | Archive with instant retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Flexible | 90 days | Minutes–hours | Archive, flexible retrieval |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | 180 days | Hours | Long-term compliance archive |
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About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every CLF-C02 question from scratch — 988 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or 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.