CLF-C02 Amazon Web Services AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

 Deploying the application in multiple Availability Zones is the best way to ensure high availability for the application. Availability Zones are isolated locations within an AWS Region that are engineered to be fault-tolerant from failures in other Availability Zones. By deploying the application in multiple Availability Zones, the company can reduce the impact of outages and increase the resilience of the application. Deploying the application in a single Availability Zone, on AWS Direct Connect, or on Reserved Instances does not provide the same level of high availability as deploying the application in multiple Availability Zones. Source: Availability Zones

AWS Storage Gateway is a hybrid cloud storage service that allows you to extend your on-premises file storage capabilities to the AWS Cloud. AWS Storage Gateway file gateway enables you to store and access your files in Amazon S3 using industry-standard file protocols such as NFS and SMB. File gateway caches frequently accessed files locally, providing low-latency access to your data. File gateway also optimizes the transfer of data between your on-premises environment and AWS, minimizing the amount of bandwidth consumed. By using file gateway, you can retain the performance benefit of sharing content locally while leveraging the scalability, durability, and cost-effectiveness of Amazon S3. References: AWS Storage Gateway, File Gateway

AWS Migration Hub is a service that provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations across multiple AWS and partner solutions. It allows you to choose the AWS and partner migration tools that best fit your needs, while providing visibility into the status of migrations across your portfolio of applications1. AWS Migration Hub supports migration status updates from the following tools: AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Database Migration Service, CloudEndure Migration, Server Migration Service, and Migrate for Compute Engine1.

The other options are not correct for the following reasons:

AWS Application Discovery Service is a service that helps you plan your migration projects by automatically identifying servers, applications, and dependencies in your on-premises data centers2. It does not track the progress of application migrations, but rather provides information to help you plan and scope your migrations.

AWS Application Migration Service is a service that helps you migrate and modernize applications from any source infrastructure to AWS with minimal downtime and disruption3. It is one of the migration tools that can send status updates to AWS Migration Hub, but it is not the service that provides a single location to track the progress of application migrations.

AWS Service Catalog is a service that allows you to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS4. It does not track the progress of application migrations, but rather helps you manage the provisioning and governance of your IT services.

1: What Is AWS Migration Hub? - AWS Migration Hub

2: What Is AWS Application Discovery Service? - AWS Application Discovery Service

3: App Migration Tool - AWS Application Migration Service - AWS

4: What Is AWS Service Catalog? - AWS Service Catalog

Amazon Cognito is a service that provides user authentication and authorization for web and mobile applications. You can use Amazon Cognito to enable users to sign in directly with a user name and password, or through a third-party provider, such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. You can also use Amazon Cognito to manage user profiles, preferences, and security settings3

According to the AWS shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud, while the customer is responsible for the security in the cloud. This means that AWS provides the physical and environmental controls, the service and communications protection, and the awareness and training for its employees, while the customer provides the patch and configuration management, the identity and access management, the data encryption, and the firewall configuration for its resources3.

 Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service that delivers sub-millisecond response times to applications. You can use ElastiCache as a primary data store for your applications, or as a cache to improve the performance of your existing databases. ElastiCache supports two popular open-source in-memory engines: Redis and Memcached5.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) is a service that provides fully managed message queues for asynchronous communication between microservices. It helps developers use loose coupling and reliable messaging by allowing them to send, store, and receive messages between distributed components without losing them or requiring each component to be always available1.Elastic Load Balancing is a service that distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses. Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a service that provides fully managed pub/sub messaging for event-driven and push-based communication between microservices. Amazon CloudFront is a service that provides a fast and secure content delivery network (CDN) for web applications.

AWS Professional Services is a team of experts that help customers achieve their desired outcomes using the AWS Cloud. One of the benefits that AWS Professional Services provides is advisory solutions for AWS adoption, which include guidance on cloud strategy, architecture, migration, and innovation2. Management of the ongoing security of user data, technical support 24 hours a day, 7days a week, and monitoring of monthly billing costs in AWS accounts are not benefits that AWSProfessional Services provides, as they are either the responsibility of the customer or the features of other AWS services or support plans3

AWS Auto Scaling is the AWS service that allows users to optimize the number of EC2 instances based on the usage pattern, as it automatically adjusts the capacity to maintain steady and predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Spot Instances are a way to reduce the cost ofEC2 instances by bidding on unused EC2 capacity, but they are not suitable for applications that require steady and reliable performance. Reserved Instances are a way to reduce the cost of EC2 instances by committing to a certain amount of usage for a period of time, but they are not flexible to adjust to the usage pattern. AWS CloudFormation is a way to automate the creation and management of AWS resources, but it does not optimize the number of EC2 instances based on the usage pattern. These concepts are explained in the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course3.

AWS Managed Services is a service that provides operational management for AWS infrastructure and applications. It helps users migrate their workloads to AWS and provides ongoing support, security, compliance, and automation. AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that provides best practices and recommendations for cost optimization, performance, security, and fault tolerance. AWS Consulting Partners are professional services firms that help customers design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS. AWS Artifacts is a service that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and select online agreements.

AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) is a service that provides temporary security credentials to users or applications that need to access AWS resources. The temporarycredentials have a limited lifetime and can be configured to last from a few minutes to several hours. The credentials are not stored with the user or application, but are generated dynamically and provided on request. The credentials work almost identically to long-term access key credentials, but have the advantage of not requiring distribution, rotation, or revocation1.

AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) is a service that provides encryption and decryption services for data and keys. It does not provide temporary security credentials2.

AWS CloudHSM is a service that provides hardware security modules (HSMs) for cryptographic operations and key management. It does not provide temporary security credentials3.

Amazon Cognito is a service that provides user authentication and authorization for web and mobile applications. It can also provide temporary security credentials for authenticated users, but not for applications4.

Convertible Reserved Instances (RIs) are a type of Reserved Instance that allow you to change the attributes of the RI as long as the exchange results in the creation of Reserved Instances of equal or greater value. You can exchange Convertible RIs for other Convertible RIs from a different instance family, size, platform, tenancy, or scope (Region or Availability Zone)3.

Amazon RDS is a service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS supports MySQL as one of the database engines. By using Amazon RDS with a MySQL database, the company can offload the tasks of patching the database and taking backup snapshots to AWS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and operating system of the database instances. Amazon RDS also automatically backs up the database and retains the backups for a user-defined retention period. The company can also restore the database to any point in time within the retention period. Deploying MySQL database server clusters onAmazon EC2 instances, using an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy MySQL database servers on Amazon EC2 instances, or migrating all the MySQL database data to Amazon S3 are not the best options to meet the requirements. These options would not automate the tasks of patching the database and taking backup snapshots, and would require more operational overhead from the company3

 AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Outposts enables you to run AWS services in your on-premises data center1.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service that delivers real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. You can use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to capture, transform, and load streaming data from multiple sources, such as web applications, mobile devices, IoT sensors, and social media.

Cloud fluency is a capability that belongs to the people perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF). Cloud fluency is the ability of the workforce to understand the benefits, challenges, and best practices of cloud computing, and to apply them to their roles and responsibilities. Cloud fluency helps the organization to adopt a cloud mindset, culture, and skills, and to leverage the full potential of the cloud. Cloud fluency can be achieved through various methods, such as training, certification, mentoring, coaching, and hands-on experience. Cloud fluency is one of the four capabilities of the people perspective, along with culture, organizational structure, and leadership. The other three capabilities belong to different perspectives of the AWS CAF. Data architecture is a capability of the platform perspective, which helps you design and implement data solutions that meet your business and technical requirements. Event management is a capability of the operations perspective, which helps you monitor and respond to events that affect the availability, performance, and security of your cloud resources. Strategic partnership is a capability of the business perspective, which helps you establish and maintain relationships with external stakeholders, such as customers, partners, suppliers, and regulators, to create value and achieve your business goals. References: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: People Perspective, AWS CAF - Cloud Adoption Framework - W3Schools

 The trade of infrastructure expenses for operating expenses is one of the benefits of the AWS Cloud. By moving to the AWS Cloud, the company can avoid the upfront costs of purchasing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, such as servers, storage, network, and software. Instead, the company can pay only for the AWS resources and services that they use, as they use them. This reduces the risk and complexity of planning and managing IT infrastructure, and allows the company to focus on innovation and growth. Increased speed to market, massive economies of scale, and the ability to go global in minutes are also benefits of the AWS Cloud, but they are not the best ones to describe this scenario. Increased speed to market means that the company can launch new products and services faster by using AWS services and tools. Massive economies of scale means that the company can benefit from the lower costs and higher performance that AWS achieves by operating at a large scale. The ability to go global in minutes means that the company can deploy their applications and data in multiple regions and availability zones around the world to reach their customers faster and improve performance and reliability5

AWS Control Tower is a service that provides an easy way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment. It automates the creation of accounts, organizational units, policies, and best practices based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework. AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On) is a service that enables users to centrally manage access to multiple AWS accounts and business applications using a single sign-on experience. AWS Systems Manager is a service that provides operational management for AWS resources and applications. AWS Config is a service that enables users to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources.

One of the benefits of operating in the AWS Cloud is the ability to expand compute, storage, and memory when needed, which enables users to scale their applications and resources up or down based on demand. This also helps users optimize their costs and performance. The ability to migrate on-premises network devices to the AWS Cloud, the ability to host custom hardware in the AWS Cloud, and the ability to customize the underlying hypervisor layer for Amazon EC2 are not benefits of operating in the AWS Cloud, as they are either not possible or not recommended by AWS .

AWS performs some tasks automatically to help you manage and secure your AWS resources. One of these tasks is patching Amazon EC2 instances. AWS provides two options for patching your EC2 instances: managed instances and patch baselines. Managed instances are a group of EC2 instances or on-premises servers that you can manage using AWS Systems Manager. Patch baselines define the patches that AWS Systems Manager applies to your instances. You can use AWS Systems Manager to automate the process of patching your instances based on a schedule or a maintenance window.

 The AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS. By using the Framework, you will learn architectural best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. The Framework consists of five pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization2.

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. It enables users to easily find the content they are looking for, even when it is scattered across multiple locations and content repositories within their organization. Amazon Kendra supports natural language queries, and can search fortext in documents stored in Amazon S3, as well as other sources such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more1.

Amazon Rekognition is a computer vision service that makes it easy to add image and video analysis to applications. It can detect objects, faces, text, scenes, activities, and emotions in images and videos. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S32.

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that turns text into lifelike speech. It can create audio versions of books, articles, podcasts, and more. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S33.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. It can create chatbots that can interact with users using natural language. However, it is not designed for searching for text in documents stored in Amazon S34.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Polly’s Text-to-Speech (TTS) service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize natural sounding human speech1. Amazon Polly supports dozens of languages and a wide range of natural-sounding voices. You can customizeand control the speech output by using lexicons and SSML tags. You can also store and redistribute the speech output in standard audio formats like MP3 and OGG2.

Amazon Transcribe is a service that converts speech to text, enabling you to create text transcripts from audio or video files. It can recognize multiple speakers, different languages, accents, dialects, and background noises. It can also add punctuation and formatting to the transcripts. Amazon Transcribe is useful for applications such as subtitling, captioning, transcription, and voice search.

Amazon Rekognition is a service that provides image and video analysis using computer vision and deep learning. It can detect objects, faces, text, scenes, activities, and emotions in images and videos. It can also perform face recognition, face comparison, face search, celebrity recognition, and facial analysis. Amazon Rekognition is useful for applications such as security, social media, e-commerce, and media and entertainment.

Amazon Textract is a service that extracts text and data from scanned documents using optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning. It can identify the contents of fields in forms and tables, as well as the relationships between them. It can also preserve the layout and structure of the original document. Amazon Textract is useful for applications such as data entry, document management, compliance, and analytics.

C is correct because turning on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for added security during the login process is one of the IAM security best practices recommended by AWS. MFA adds an extra layer of protection on top of the user name and password, making it harder for attackers to access the AWS account. A is incorrect because using the account root user access keys for administrative tasks is not a good practice, as the root user has full access to all the resources in the AWS account and can cause irreparable damage if compromised. AWS recommends creating individual IAM users with the least privilege principle and using roles for applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances. B is incorrect because granting broad permissions so that all company employees can access the resources they need is not a good practice, as it increases the risk of unauthorized or accidental actions on the AWS resources. AWS recommends granting only the permissions that are required to perform a task and using groups to assign permissions to IAM users. D is incorrect because avoiding rotating credentials to prevent issues in production applications is not a good practice, as it increases the risk of credential leakage or compromise. AWS recommends rotating credentials regularly and using temporary security credentials from AWS STS when possible.

 Amazon GuardDuty is a service that provides intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring for your AWS accounts, workloads, and data. Amazon GuardDuty analyzes and processes data sources, such as VPC Flow Logs, AWS CloudTrail event logs, and DNS logs, to identify malicious activities and unauthorized actions, such as reconnaissance, instance compromise, account compromise, and data exfiltration. Amazon GuardDuty can also detect threats to your data stored in Amazon S3, such as API calls from unusual locations or disabling of preventative controls. Amazon GuardDuty generates findings that summarize the details of the detected threats and provides recommendations for remediation. AWS Shield, AWS Firewall Manager, and Amazon Inspector are not the best services to meet this requirement. AWS Shield is a service that provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS Firewall Manager is a service that allows you to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and resources. Amazon Inspector is a service that assesses the security and compliance of your applications running on EC2 instances.

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database service that can deliver consistent, single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. DynamoDB can automatically scale throughput capacity to meet the demands of the database workload, without requiring any manual intervention. DynamoDB is ideal for NoSQL applications that need high performance, availability, and scalability. DynamoDB also offers features such as encryption at rest, point-in-time recovery, global tables, and in-memory caching. References: What is NoSQL?, Amazon DynamoDB, [AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials: Module 4 - Databases in the Cloud]

 D is correct because security groups are the AWS service or feature that can be used to control inbound and outbound traffic on an Amazon EC2 instance. Security groups act as a virtual firewall for the EC2 instance, allowing users to specify which protocols, ports, and source or destination IP addresses are allowed or denied. A is incorrect because internet gateways are the AWS service or feature that enable communication between instances in a VPC and the internet. They do not control the traffic on an EC2 instance. B is incorrect because AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the AWS service or feature that enables users to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. It does not control the traffic on an EC2 instance. C is incorrect because network ACLs are the AWS service or feature that provide an optional layer of security for the VPC that acts as a firewall for controlling traffic in and out of one or more subnets. They do not control the traffic on an EC2 instance.

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across your AWS infrastructure. You can use CloudTrail to identify who accessed an AWS service and what action was performed for a given time period. Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Inspector are AWS services that provide different types of monitoring and security capabilities.

This is a benefit of using an AWS managed service, such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, or AWS Lambda. AWS managed services are fully managed by AWS, which means that AWS handles the provisioning, scaling, patching, backup, and recovery of the underlying infrastructure and software. This reduces the operational overhead for the company’s IT staff, who can focus on their core business logic and innovation. You can learn more about the AWS managed services from this webpage or this digital course.

 AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. You can also use AWS Budgets to set reservation utilization or coverage targets and receive alerts when your utilization drops below the threshold you define. AWS Budgets provides you with a comprehensive view of your cost and usage, as well as your reservation utilization and coverage1.

 The AWS service or feature that the company should use to categorize and track AWS usage cost based on business categories is cost allocation tags. Cost allocation tags are key-value pairs that users can attach to AWS resources to organize and track their AWS costs. Users can use cost allocation tags to filter and group their AWS costs by categories such as project, department, environment, or application. Users can also use cost allocation tags to generate detailed billing reports that show the costs associated with each tag3. AWS Organizations, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Cost and Usage Report are other AWS services or features that can help users with different aspects of their AWS usage, such as managing multiple accounts, monitoring security issues, or analyzing billing data, but they do not enable users to categorize and track AWS costs based on business categories.

Cost optimization is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It focuses on avoiding unnecessary costs, understanding and controlling where money is being spent, selecting the most appropriate and right number of resource types, analyzing spend over time, and scaling to meet business needs without overspending.

The AWS service that should be used when a company needs to provide its remote employees with virtual desktops is Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed, secure desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution that runs on AWS. Amazon WorkSpaces allows users to provision cloud-based virtual desktops and provide their end users access to the documents, applications, and resources they need from any supported device, including Windows and Mac computers, Chromebooks, iPads, Fire tablets, and Android tablets4. Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Directory Service, and AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On) are other AWS services related to identity and access management, but they do not provide virtual desktops.

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications or APIs against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over how traffic reaches your applications by enabling you to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-sitescripting, and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns you define2. You can use AWS WAF to create a custom rule that blocks SQL injection attacks on your website.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multi-region, multi-active, durable database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and can support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second. DynamoDB provides the least operational overhead for storing data from a recommendation engine, as it does not require any server provisioning, patching, or maintenance3

AWS Outposts is an AWS service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. AWS Outposts enables you to run Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS services locally, while maintaining a consistent and seamless connection to the AWS Cloud. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or data residency. By using AWS Outposts, the company can process personallyidentifiable information (PII) and keep data in the country where it was generated, while leveraging the benefits of AWS

Changing AWS Support plans is a task that must be performed by using the AWS account root user credentials. The root user is the email address that you used to sign up for AWS. It has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. You should use the root user only to perform a few account and service management tasks, such as changing AWS Support plans, closing the account, or changing the account name or email address. Making changes to AWS production resources, accessing AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and granting auditors access to an AWS account for a compliance audit are tasks that can be performed by using IAM users or roles, which are entities that you create in AWS to delegate permissions to access AWS services and resources.

Hardware and infrastructure is the option that AWS is responsible for under the AWS shared responsibility model. The AWS shared responsibility model describes how AWS and customers share responsibilities for security and compliance in the cloud. AWS is responsible for security of the cloud, which means protecting the infrastructure that runs all the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This infrastructure is composed of the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS Cloud services. Customers are responsible for security in the cloud, which means taking care of the security of their own applications, data, and operating systems. This includes network and firewall configuration, client-side data encryption, management of user permissions, and more.

The AWS account root user is the identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. It is accessed by signing in with the email address and password that were used to create the account1. The root user should be protected and used only for a few account and service management tasks that require it1. Therefore, the following actions are best practices for an AWS account root user:

Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on the root user. MFA is a security feature that requires users to provide two or more pieces of information to authenticate themselves, such as a password and a code from a device. MFA adds an extra layer of protection for the root user credentials, which can access sensitive information and perform critical operations in the account2.

Create an IAM user with administrator privileges for daily administrative tasks, instead of using the root user. IAM is a service that helps customers manage access to AWS resources for users and groups. Customers can create IAM users and assign them permissions to perform specific tasks on specific resources. Customers can also create IAM roles and policies to delegate access to other AWS services or external entities3. By creating an IAM user with administrator privileges, customers can avoid using the root user for everyday tasks and reduce the risk of accidental or malicious changes to the account1.