Free Practice Questions for Amazon Web Services CLF-C02 Exam

The AWS service that provides the ability to manage infrastructure as code is AWS CloudFormation. Infrastructure as code is a process of defining and provisioning AWS resources using code or templates, rather than manual actions or scripts. AWS CloudFormation allows you to create and update stacks of AWS resources based on predefined templates that describe the desired state and configuration of the resources. AWS CloudFormation automates and simplifies the deployment and management of AWS resources, and ensures consistency and repeatability across different environments and regions. AWS CloudFormation also supports rollback, change sets, drift detection, and nested stacks features that help you to monitor and control the changes to your infrastructure1.

 AWS Cost Explorer is an AWS service or tool that the company can use to periodically review its AWS account for cost optimization opportunities. AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables the company to visualize, understand, and manage their AWS costs and usage over time. The company can use AWS Cost Explorer to access interactive graphs and tables that show the breakdown of their costs and usage by service, region, account, tag, and more. The company can also use AWS Cost Explorer to forecast their future costs, identify trends and anomalies, and discover potential savings by using Reserved Instances or Savings Plans.

 Refine operation procedures frequently is one of the design principles of the operational excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It means that users should continuously review and validate their operational processes to ensure that they are effective and that staff are familiar with them. It also means that users should identify and address any gaps or issues in their processes, and incorporate feedback and lessons learned from operational events5. Perform operations as code is another design principle of the operational excellence pillar, which means that users should automate and script their operational tasks to reduce human error and enable consistent and repeatable execution. Make frequent, small, reversible changes is a design principle of the reliability pillar, which means that users should deploy changes in small increments that can be easily tested and rolled back if necessary. Structure the company to support business outcomes is a design principle of the performance efficiency pillar, which means that users should align their organizational structure and culture with their business goals and cloud strategy.

Savings Plans are an AWS pricing model or offering that can meet the requirements of seeking cost savings in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount of an AWS service or category of AWS services for 1 year or 3 years. Savings Plans are flexible plans that offer significant discounts on AWS compute usage, such as EC2, Lambda, and Fargate. The company can choose from two types of Savings Plans: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instance Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans provide the most flexibility and apply to any eligible compute usage, regardless of instance family, size, region, operating system, or tenancy. EC2 Instance Savings Plans provide more savings and apply to a specific instance family within a region. The company can select the amount of compute usage per hour (e.g., $10/hour) that they want to commit to for the duration of the plan (1 year or 3 years). The company will pay the discounted Savings Plan rate for the amount of usage that matches their commitment, and the regular on-demand rate for any usage beyond that

Security groups are the AWS service or feature that can be used to apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances. Security groups are virtual firewalls that control the inbound and outbound traffic for one or more instances. Customers can create security groups and add rules that reflect the role of the instance that is associated with the security group. For example, a web server instance needs security group rules that allow inbound HTTP and HTTPS access, while a database instance needs rules that allow access for the type of database12. Security groups are stateful, meaning that the responses to allowed inbound traffic are alsoallowed, regardless of the outbound rules1. Customers can assign multiple security groups to an instance, and the rules from each security group are effectively aggregated to create one set of rules1.

Network ACLs are another AWS service or feature that can be used to control the traffic for a subnet. Network ACLs are stateless, meaning that they do not track the traffic that they allow. Therefore, customers must add rules for both inbound and outbound traffic3. Network ACLs are applied at the subnet level, not at the instance level.

AWS Trusted Advisor is an AWS service that provides best practice recommendations for security, performance, cost optimization, and fault tolerance. AWS Trusted Advisor does not apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances, but it can help customers identify security gaps and improve their security posture4.

AWS WAF is an AWS service that helps protect web applications from common web exploits, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and bot attacks. AWS WAF does not apply security rules to specific Amazon EC2 instances, but it can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Application Load Balancer.

The cost of application software licenses is the company’s direct responsibility when it migrates its IT infrastructure from an on-premises data center to the AWS Cloud. Application software licenses are the agreements that grant users the right to use specific software products, such as operating systems, databases, or applications. Depending on the type and terms of the license, users may need to pay a fee to the software vendor or provider to use the software legally and access its features and updates. When users migrate their IT infrastructure to the AWS Cloud, they can choose to buy new licenses from AWS, bring their own licenses (BYOL), or use a combination of both. However, regardless of the option they choose, they are still responsible for complying with the license terms and paying the license fees to the software vendor or provider. AWS does not charge users for the application software licenses they bring or buy, but only for the AWS resources they use to run their applications. Therefore, thecost of application software licenses is the only cost among the options that is the company’s direct responsibility. The other costs are either included in the AWS service fees or covered by AWS.

 AWS License Manager Pricing, Software licensing: The blind spot in public cloud costs, Cost Optimization tips for SQL Server Licenses on AWS, Microsoft Licensing on AWS

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a service that allows you to deploy and manage applications on AWS without manually creating and configuring the required resources, such as EC2 instances, load balancers, security groups, databases, and more. AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the provisioning, scaling, load balancing, health monitoring, and updating of your application, while giving you full control over the underlying AWS resources if needed. AWS Elastic Beanstalk supports a variety of platforms and languages, such as Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker. You can use the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or the AWS Elastic Beanstalk API to create and manage your applications. You can also use AWS CodeStar, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline to integrate AWS Elastic Beanstalk with your development and deployment workflows12

 These are two scenarios that represent the concept of elasticity on AWS. Elasticity means the ability to adjust the resources and capacity of the system in response to changes in demand or environment. Scaling the number of Amazon EC2 instances based on traffic means using services such as AWS Auto Scaling or Elastic Load Balancing to add or remove instances as the traffic increases or decreases. Resizing Amazon RDS instances as business needs change means using the Amazon RDS console or API to modify the instance type, storage type, or storage size of the database as the workload grows or shrinks. You can learn more about the concept of elasticity on AWS from [this webpage] or [this digital course].

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

The correct answer is B. Amazon Inspector.

Amazon Inspector is an automated vulnerability management service that continually scans AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure.Amazon Inspector automatically discovers workloads, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, and Lambda functions, and scans them for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure12.

Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that monitors your AWS accounts and workloads for malicious or unauthorized activity.Amazon GuardDuty does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather analyzes AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and DNS logs to detect threats such as compromised credentials, backdoors, or crypto mining3.

AWS Security Hub is a security and compliance service that aggregates and prioritizes security findings from multiple AWS services and partner solutions.AWSSecurity Hub does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather provides a comprehensive view of your security posture across your AWS accounts4.

AWS Shield is a managed service that protects your web applications and network resources from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.AWS Shield does not scan for software vulnerabilities, but rather provides detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks at the network and application layers5.

IAM roles are a way to delegate access to resources in different AWS accounts. IAM roles allow users to assume a set of permissions for a limited time without having to create or share long-term credentials. IAM roles can be used to grant cross-account access by creating a trust relationship between the accounts and specifying the permissions that the role can perform. Users can then switch to the role and access the resources in the other account using temporary security credentials provided by the role. References: Cross account resource access in IAM, IAM tutorial: Delegate access across AWS accounts using IAM roles, How to Enable Cross-Account Access to the AWS Management Console

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

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that helps you securely control access to AWS resources for your users. You use IAM to control who can use your AWS resources (authentication) and what resources they can use and in what ways (authorization). IAM is always available free of charge to users4.

AWS Organizations is a service that helps you centrally manage and govern your AWS environment. You can use AWS Organizations to create multiple accounts for different business units, and group them into organizational units (OUs) that reflect your organizational structure1. By doing so, you can separate and track costs for each business unit using the account ID as a cost allocation tag2. You can also use AWSOrganizations to apply policies and controls to your accounts, such as service control policies (SCPs) and tag policies1.

The other options are not suitable for meeting the requirements with the least operational overhead. Using a spreadsheet or a DynamoDB table to control and record costs for each business unit would require manual data entry and maintenance, which is prone to errors and inconsistencies. Using the AWS Billing console to assign owners to resources and track costs would also require manual tagging of each resource, which is time-consuming and inefficient.

1: What Is AWS Organizations? - AWS Organizations

2: Cost Tagging and Reporting with AWS Organizations | AWS Cloud Financial Management

AWS Enterprise Support plan is the highest level of support that AWS offers to its customers. One of the exclusive benefits of this plan is the access to a technical account manager (TAM), who is adedicated point of contact for guidance, advocacy, and support2. A technical project manager, a cloud support engineer, and a solutions architect are not exclusive benefits of the AWS Enterprise Support plan, as they are also available to customers with lower-tier support plans or through other AWS services or programs345.

AWS Systems Manager gives you visibility and control of your infrastructure on AWS. Systems Manager provides a unified user interface so you can view operational data from multiple AWS services and allows you to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources. You can use Systems Manager to apply OS patches, create system images, configure Windows and Linux operating systems, and execute PowerShell commands5. Systems Manager can help you ensure that all of your Amazon EC2 instances have compliant operating system patches by using the Patch Manager feature.

Scaling horizontally across multiple Availability Zones is a way to adopt a highly available architecture, as it increases the fault tolerance and resilience of the application. Scaling vertically to a larger EC2 instance size is a way to improve the performance of the application, but it does not improve the availability. Purchasing an EC2 Dedicated Instance is a way to isolate the instance from other AWS customers, but it does not improve the availability. Changing the EC2 instance family to a compute optimized instance is a way to optimize the instance type for the workload, but it does not improve the availability. These concepts are explained in the AWS Well-Architected Framework2.

 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.

 To make a subnet public, the company should use an Amazon VPC internet gateway and an Amazon VPC route table. An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between your VPC and the internet. A route table contains a set of rules, called routes, that are used to determine where network traffic from your subnet or gateway is directed. To enable internet access for a subnet, you need to attach an internet gateway to your VPC and add a route to the internet gateway in the route table associated with the subnet.

 AWS Shield is an AWS service that provides protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for applications that run in the AWS Cloud. DDoS attacks are attempts to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. AWS Shield provides two tiers of protection: AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced. AWS Shield Standard is automatically enabled for all AWS customers at no additional charge. It provides protection against common and frequently occurring network and transport layer DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Advanced is an optional paid service that provides additional protection against larger and more sophisticated DDoS attacks. AWS Shield Advanced also provides access to 24/7 DDoS response team, cost protection, and enhanced detection and mitigation capabilities