AWS Cloud Practitioner practice questions
17 AWS Cloud Practitioner practice questions with answers and explanations, grouped by the four CLF-C02 domains and weighted roughly like the real exam.
These 17 AWS Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) practice questions come straight from the Encodr course, grouped by the four exam domains and counted roughly in proportion to the exam weights: 4 on Cloud Concepts (24%), 5 on Security and Compliance (30%), 6 on Cloud Technology and Services (34%) and 2 on Billing, Pricing and Support (12%). The real exam is 65 questions in 90 minutes, so this is a sampler, not a mock exam. For the format and scoring, see what is on the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam.
Cover the answer, choose an option, then read the explanation. A wrong answer is useful: write down the one fact that would have separated the right option from yours. Answering from memory before checking is the point; the testing effect explains why it beats rereading notes.
Domain 1: Cloud Concepts
1. A startup avoids buying servers and pays by the hour for what it uses. Which advantage is this?
- A. Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
- B. Trade fixed expense for variable expense
- C. Stop guessing capacity
- D. Go global in minutes
Answer: Trade fixed expense for variable expense. Paying hourly instead of buying hardware swaps fixed upfront spending for usage-based spending.
2. Which of these is NOT a pillar of the Well-Architected Framework?
- A. Reliability
- B. Security
- C. Scalability
- D. Performance Efficiency
Answer: Scalability. Scalability is a concept inside several pillars, not a pillar itself.
3. A team moves its on-premises SQL Server database to Amazon RDS for SQL Server and leaves the app logic alone. Which strategy is this?
- A. Replatform
- B. Rehost
- C. Refactor
- D. Retire
Answer: Replatform. Replatform adds small optimizations, such as a managed database, without changing the core architecture.
4. Traffic is heavy on weekday afternoons and servers should shrink at night. Which concept does this describe?
- A. Elasticity
- B. High availability
- C. Fault tolerance
- D. Durability
Answer: Elasticity. Capacity that tracks demand both up and down is elasticity.
Domain 2: Security and Compliance
5. On Amazon EC2, who patches the guest operating system?
- A. AWS
- B. A third-party auditor
- C. AWS Support
- D. The customer
Answer: The customer. On EC2 the guest OS, installed software and updates are customer duties.
6. On Amazon RDS, who patches the operating system and database engine?
- A. AWS
- B. The customer
- C. Both, each for its own part
- D. A third-party auditor
Answer: AWS. RDS is a managed service, so AWS performs OS and database software patching.
7. Which is an example of an inherited control?
- A. Patch management of guest operating systems
- B. Awareness and training of staff
- C. Physical and environmental controls
- D. Zone security for routing customer data
Answer: Physical and environmental controls. Inherited controls are ones the customer fully inherits from AWS.
8. A team wants continuous threat detection for suspicious activity in its AWS account. Which service fits?
- A. Amazon Inspector
- B. Amazon Macie
- C. Amazon GuardDuty
- D. AWS Shield
Answer: Amazon GuardDuty. GuardDuty watches for malicious or unauthorized activity; the others do vulnerabilities, data discovery or DDoS defense.
9. Which of these tasks requires the root user?
- A. Closing a standalone AWS account
- B. Creating an IAM user for a new employee
- C. Launching an EC2 instance
- D. Attaching a policy to a group
Answer: Closing a standalone AWS account. Closing a standalone account is one of the tasks only root can do.
Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services
10. Which design choice protects an application against the failure of one data-center group inside a Region?
- A. Spreading it across multiple Availability Zones
- B. Running everything in one Availability Zone only
- C. Choosing a Region with a wider range of services
- D. Using a larger instance size for each server
Answer: Spreading it across multiple Availability Zones. Using multiple AZs keeps the application running if one AZ fails, giving high availability.
11. A team wants to run a long-running containerized app without managing servers. Which service fits?
- A. AWS Lambda
- B. AWS Fargate
- C. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
- D. Amazon ECR
Answer: AWS Fargate. Fargate is serverless compute for containers; Lambda is for short event-driven code.
12. Which S3 class is the lowest-cost option, for data accessed less than once a year?
- A. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
- B. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval
- C. S3 Standard-IA
- D. S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Answer: S3 Glacier Deep Archive. Deep Archive has a 180-day minimum storage duration.
13. Which Amazon RDS option keeps a synchronous standby in another Availability Zone and fails over automatically?
- A. Read replica
- B. Multi-AZ deployment
- C. Aurora Global Database
- D. Provisioned IOPS storage
Answer: Multi-AZ deployment. Multi-AZ is the RDS high-availability feature: a synchronous standby in a second AZ with automatic failover.
14. You must block one specific malicious IP address range from reaching a subnet. What should you use?
- A. A security group deny rule
- B. A bigger instance type
- C. A NAT gateway
- D. A network ACL deny rule
Answer: A network ACL deny rule. Only network ACLs can explicitly deny a specific IP address or range.
15. Which service gives you two static anycast IP addresses as fixed entry points and does NOT cache content?
- A. Amazon CloudFront
- B. AWS Global Accelerator
- C. Amazon API Gateway
- D. Elastic Load Balancing
Answer: AWS Global Accelerator. Global Accelerator routes traffic over the AWS global network to healthy endpoints and supports TCP and UDP without caching.
Domain 4: Billing, Pricing and Support
16. A finance team wants an email whenever monthly spend crosses a limit it chose. Which tool fits?
- A. AWS Cost Explorer
- B. AWS Pricing Calculator
- C. AWS Budgets
- D. AWS Artifact
Answer: AWS Budgets. Budgets tracks actual cost, usage and coverage against targets you define and alerts on thresholds.
17. A batch job can be interrupted and restarted at any time, and cost is the main concern. Which purchasing option fits best?
- A. Spot Instances
- B. On-Demand Instances
- C. Dedicated Hosts
- D. Standard Reserved Instances
Answer: Spot Instances. Spot uses spare capacity for fault-tolerant, flexible workloads.
What to do with your results
Sort your misses by domain. Because scoring is compensatory, one weak domain can be absorbed if the others are strong, but Security and Compliance and Cloud Technology and Services together carry 64% of the exam, so misses there cost the most. Questions 5, 6 and 7 are about the shared responsibility model, and question 12 is a storage class item covered in S3 storage classes compared. If you keep missing look-alike pairs such as GuardDuty and Inspector, the plan in how to study for the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam has a section on separating them.
Questions like these are a retrieval check, not a full question bank; flashcards vs question banks explains what each tool is for. The full set is in the Encodr AWS Cloud Practitioner flashcards: 17 units, 58 chapters and 1,302 study cards, with an exam-day unit of look-alike matchups. The course is unofficial and not affiliated with or endorsed by AWS, and it is recall practice, not a substitute for time in the AWS console. If you are deciding between clouds, AWS vs Azure: which cloud cert first compares the two entry exams, and Azure Fundamentals practice questions is the Microsoft equivalent of this page.
<!-- card ids: aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-1-cloud-fundamentals-and-benefits-six-advantages-of-cloud-mc-cwaxcx0, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-2-well-architected-framework-six-pillars-mc-jfjwx, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-10-migration-and-adoption-migration-strategies-mc-pz3upz, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-1-cloud-fundamentals-and-benefits-elasticity-scalability-and-availability-mc-ewaoqt, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-11-shared-responsibility-model-model-basics-mc-ha0121, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-11-shared-responsibility-model-responsibility-by-service-mc-2euf7, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-11-shared-responsibility-model-model-basics-mc-5l6xb5, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-14-security-services-and-resources-threat-detection-and-vulnerability-services-mc-xbbrz0y, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-13-identity-and-access-management-root-user-and-mfa-mc-3gp5x5, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-3-global-infrastructure-and-access-regions-azs-and-edge-locations-mc-xwqdarh, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-4-compute-services-serverless-compute-mc-fh2qy7, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-5-storage-services-s3-and-storage-classes-mc-uwlta1u, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-6-databases-and-analytics-relational-databases-mc-ngewh6, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-7-networking-services-security-groups-and-network-acls-mc-erpu5m, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-7-networking-services-dns-and-content-delivery-mc-by9f0, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-16-billing-support-and-resources-billing-and-cost-management-tools-mc-ei5l27, aws-cloud-practitioner-unit-15-pricing-models-compute-purchasing-options-mc-q4nbd -->
Encodr turns this into a habit: study anything in a feed, and it schedules the rest.
Get started free