CLF-C02

Exam Code: CLF-C02  |  Duration: 90 minutes  |  Questions: 65  |  Passing Score: 700/1000

Format: Multiple choice and multiple response

Domain Weights:

• Cloud Concepts — 24% (concepts, economics, design principles)
• Security and Compliance — 30% (shared responsibility, security services)
• Cloud Technology and Services — 34% (compute, storage, database, networking)
• Billing, Pricing, and Support — 12% (pricing models, billing, support plans)

6 Advantages of Cloud:

1. Trade CapEx for OpEx (variable expense)
2. Massive economies of scale
3. Stop guessing capacity
4. Increase speed and agility
5. Stop spending on data centers
6. Go global in minutes

Cloud Models:

• IaaS — EC2, VPC (you manage OS, middleware, apps)
• PaaS — Elastic Beanstalk, Lightsail (you manage code & data)
• SaaS — WorkMail, Chime (vendor manages everything)

Well-Architected 6 Pillars:

Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability

Shared Responsibility Model:

• AWS: Physical hardware, global infrastructure, managed services, hypervisor
• Customer: Data, IAM, encryption, OS patching, firewall/SG, network config

Key Security Services:

• IAM — Users, Groups, Roles, Policies (global service)
• MFA — Always enable for root account
• KMS — Key management and encryption
• Shield — DDoS protection (Standard = free)
• WAF — Web Application Firewall (SQL injection, XSS)
• GuardDuty — Threat detection (ML-based)
• Inspector — Automated security assessments
• CloudTrail — API call logging and auditing
• Config — Resource configuration tracking
• Macie — Sensitive data discovery in S3

SG vs NACL:

Security Groups: Stateful, instance-level, allow only, default deny inbound

NACLs: Stateless, subnet-level, allow + deny rules, default allow all

Compute:

• EC2 — Virtual servers (IaaS)
• Lambda — Serverless functions (max 15 min)
• ECS/EKS — Container orchestration
• Fargate — Serverless containers
• Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS, deploy apps easily
• Lightsail — Simple VPS, predictable pricing

Storage:

• S3 — Object storage (11 9s durability)
• EBS — Block storage for EC2 (single AZ)
• EFS — Shared file storage (multi-AZ)
• S3 Glacier — Long-term archival
• Storage Gateway — Hybrid storage

Database:

• RDS — Managed relational (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.)
• Aurora — High-performance MySQL/PostgreSQL
• DynamoDB — NoSQL key-value (serverless)
• ElastiCache — In-memory caching (Redis, Memcached)
• Redshift — Data warehouse (analytics)

Networking:

• VPC — Virtual network
• CloudFront — CDN (edge caching)
• Route 53 — DNS service
• Direct Connect — Dedicated private connection
• ELB — ALB (Layer 7), NLB (Layer 4)

EC2 Pricing:

• On-Demand — Pay per second/hour, no commitment
• Reserved — 1 or 3 year, up to 72% savings
• Spot — Up to 90% savings, can be interrupted
• Savings Plans — Flexible hourly commitment
• Dedicated Hosts — Physical server for compliance

Billing Tools:

• Cost Explorer — Visualize & analyze costs
• Budgets — Set alerts on cost/usage
• Pricing Calculator — Estimate costs beforehand
• Cost & Usage Report — Most detailed billing data
• Organizations — Consolidated billing for multi-account

Free Tier Types:

Always Free: Lambda 1M req/mo, DynamoDB 25GB

12 Months Free: EC2 t2/t3.micro 750hrs/mo, S3 5GB, RDS 750hrs/mo

Trials: Short-term free trials per service

AWS Support Plans Comparison:

Trusted Advisor 5 Categories:

Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, Service Limits