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335 multiple-choice questions, 280 flashcards and 12 scenario simulations, organised into 4 chapters, written to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner blueprint. Every question carries a full rationale.
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AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) public exam guide. Domains: Cloud Concepts (24%), Security & Compliance (30%), Cloud Technology & Services (34%), Billing, Pricing & Support (12%). References publicly available AWS documentation, the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS Shared Responsibility Model. MCQs reference AWS service descriptions and concepts from public AWS materials — no actual exam content used.
CoStudy's AWS Cloud Practitioner bank holds 627 items organised into 4 chapters that follow the published blueprint. Every multiple-choice question carries a written rationale explaining why the correct answer is correct and why each distractor is tempting but wrong, and the bank includes 12 scenario-based simulations.
Each chapter follows a domain of the published exam outline. Practise one on its own:
A sample of 20 multiple-choice questions from the bank, with the full rationale shown.
Which is NOT one of the six Well-Architected pillars?
Answer: C — Scalability pillar of the framework
C, Scalability is a goal, not a named pillar. The six pillars are Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability.
Which Well-Architected pillar was added to the framework in December 2021?
Answer: C — Sustainability pillar practices
C, Sustainability was added in 2021. A, B, D are original pillars from the initial framework.
Which AWS pillar of the Well-Architected Framework focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value?
Answer: D — Six pillars for building on AWS
Six pillars: Ops, Security, Reliability, Performance, Cost, Sustainability. The other options undercount or misscope.
Under Sustainability shared responsibility, what is the customer responsible for?
Answer: C — Workload design and right-sizing choices
C, customer owns Sustainability 'in the cloud': workload design, right-sizing, data lifecycle, Region choice. A, B, D are AWS responsibilities.
How do Spot Instances for batch work support Sustainability?
Answer: B — Spot uses AWS spare capacity efficiently
B, Spot consumes spare capacity that would otherwise sit idle, improving fleet utilization and energy efficiency. A, C, D are wrong.
AWS Organizations:
Answer: C — Central management of multiple accounts
Organizations manages many accounts with SCPs and consolidated billing. IAM handles users. CloudTrail logs API. ECS/EKS manages containers.
Under Shared Responsibility, who patches the EC2 guest OS versus the hypervisor?
Answer: D — Customer patches guest OS; AWS hypervisor
D, customer owns guest OS, apps, data. AWS owns hypervisor, hardware, facility. A, B, C reverse or merge the split.
How should an application on EC2 obtain credentials to call the S3 API?
Answer: D — Attach an IAM role to the EC2 instance
D, IAM roles for EC2 provide auto-rotated temporary credentials. A, B, C are anti-patterns; embedded or long-lived keys should never be used.
Which is the BEST description of an IAM group?
Answer: C — A collection of IAM users that share a set of attached
A) Correct: A collection of IAM users that share a set of attached. Other options describe different AWS services that are common confusions.
Which AWS service provides automatic DDoS protection at no additional cost for all AWS customers?
Answer: C — AWS Shield
Shield protects against DDoS attacks. WAF blocks web exploits. GuardDuty detects threats. Inspector scans for vulns.
Which AWS service is a serverless event bus that ingests events from AWS services, custom apps, and many SaaS providers, routing them via rules?
Answer: C — Amazon EventBridge
A) SNS does pub/sub fan-out, but without EventBridge's native SaaS-partner integrations and rule-based content filtering. B) SQS is a queue for one consumer group, not an event bus routing to multiple rule-matched targets. C) Correct: EventBridge is a serverless event bus that ingests events from AWS services, custom apps, and SaaS providers and routes them via rules. D) Step Functions orchestrates a defined workflow, not a general-purpose event bus.
AWS Auto Scaling:
Answer: B — Automatic capacity adjustment by demand
Auto Scaling Groups adjust capacity automatically. Manual scaling is not elastic. Vertical scaling misses horizontal add. Fixed provisioning contradicts elasticity.
Which service provides NFS-mounted shared file storage across many EC2 instances?
Answer: C — Amazon Elastic File System share
C, EFS is the NFS-mounted shared filesystem. A is per-instance block. B is object. D is data-transfer hardware.
Which AWS service is used to define infrastructure as code using templates that AWS provisions as stacks?
Answer: D — AWS CloudFormation
A) Systems Manager provides operational tooling, not template-based resource provisioning. B) AWS Config tracks configuration state; it doesn't provision resources. C) OpsWorks manages configuration via Chef/Puppet — a different IaC model than declarative stacks. D) Correct: CloudFormation defines infrastructure as code using templates that AWS provisions as stacks.
Which AWS service automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets?
Answer: C — Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
A) Lambda executes code per event but doesn't itself distribute traffic across targets. B) Dedicated Hosts are billed EC2 capacity, not a traffic-distribution service. C) Correct: Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets. D) The EKS control plane manages the Kubernetes API, not application-layer load balancing.
A workload runs 24/7 for 3 years at predictable load. Which model gives the largest discount?
Answer: B — 3-year All-Upfront Reserved Instance
B, 3-year all-upfront RIs maximize the commitment discount. A is baseline. C can be interrupted. D provides no commitment discount.
A workload needs software licensed per physical socket. Which tenancy model fits?
Answer: B — Dedicated Hosts with socket visibility
B, Dedicated Hosts give socket visibility for BYOL licensing. C is dedicated hardware but no socket view. A, D do not fit licensing needs.
Which AWS Support plan includes a dedicated Technical Account Manager?
Answer: D — Enterprise Support with dedicated TAM
D, Enterprise tier includes a dedicated TAM. A is free with limited tooling. B is business-hours. C is 24/7 but no TAM.
The Free Tier 12-month EC2 offer includes approximately what?
Answer: A — 750 hours per month of a t2/t3 micro
A, 750 hours = one micro instance running continuously all month. B, C, D misstate the offer.
How much notice does AWS give before reclaiming a Spot Instance?
Answer: B — Two minutes before reclamation notice
B, the two-minute Spot interruption notice is the canonical figure. A, C, D are wrong.
6 sample cards from the 280 in the bank.
What is AWS Direct Connect?
Dedicated private network connection from on-premises to AWS. Consistent performance, lower latency vs. internet.
What is the AWS Shared Responsibility Model for S3?
AWS: S3 infrastructure, availability, durability. Customer: data classification, IAM policies, bucket policies, encryption settings, access logging.
What is AWS Amplify?
Set of tools for building full-stack web and mobile apps, including hosting, authentication, APIs, and storage.
What is the AWS Pricing Calculator?
A tool to estimate the cost of AWS services for your specific use case before deploying.
What is Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights?
Interactively search and analyze log data in CloudWatch Logs using a purpose-built query language.
What is the root user?
The account created when setting up AWS. Full unrestricted access. Best practice: secure with MFA, use minimally, create IAM users for daily tasks.
These samples are a small slice. The full bank runs flashcards, multiple choice and timed mock exams with per-chapter progress tracking, on the web and in the iOS app.
The AWS Cloud Practitioner bank holds 627 items: 335 multiple-choice questions, 280 flashcards and 12 scenario-based simulations. 26 of them are on this page to read free, with no signup.
Yes. Every multiple-choice item carries a written rationale that states the controlling principle behind the correct answer and then addresses each wrong option in turn — why it tempts and precisely where it fails. Knowing why the plausible answer was wrong is worth more than knowing which letter was right.
It is organised into 4 chapters that follow the published exam blueprint: Cloud Concepts; Security and Compliance; Cloud Technology and Services; Billing, Pricing, and Support. The number of questions in each chapter is proportional to that domain's published weight, so working through the bank exposes you to roughly the mix the real exam uses.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) public exam guide. Domains: Cloud Concepts (24%), Security & Compliance (30%), Cloud Technology & Services (34%), Billing, Pricing & Support (12%). References publicly available AWS documentation, the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS Shared Responsibility Model. MCQs reference AWS service descriptions and concepts from public AWS materials — no actual exam content used.
The samples on this page are free to read in full, rationales included, with no account. The complete 627-item bank, the timed mock exams and per-chapter progress tracking are part of CoStudy on the web and in the iOS app.
Last reviewed 2026-08-22. Banks are written against the certifying body's published exam outline and re-checked when that outline changes — exams get renumbered, retired and reweighted, and a bank written to a superseded outline teaches the wrong proportions. Figures that are re-indexed annually are deliberately not asserted as rules; the questions test the governing principle instead.
This bank is written against AWS's published exam material. Check the AWS Certification exam guides for the current outline, fees and eligibility rules — those change, and the certifying body is the only authority on them. CoStudy is not affiliated with AWS.