The Exam Room · CLF-C02
Cloud Practitioner
Where the whole thing starts: what AWS sells, what it costs, and who is responsible for what. Preparing for the Cloud Practitioner certification.
The domain-by-domain checklist sorts the whole track into the exam's scored domains.
Exam Room · Cloud Practitioner
Cheat Sheet: Cloud Concepts
A final-review sheet for CLF-C02 Domain 1: the value proposition of the cloud, the six Well-Architected pillars and what separates them, the Cloud Adoption Framework, the seven migration strategies, and the economics that turn a data centre into a monthly bill.
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Forty Applications and a Lease That Ends in March
A regional insurer will not be renewing its data centre lease, which gives forty applications about seven months to be somewhere else. Rewriting all of them is not available. Lifting all of them wastes the one chance to fix the worst of them. Sorting forty applications into the right seven buckets is the actual work, and the sorting rule is not technical.
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The Servers We Sized for One Tuesday in November
An online retailer runs at 8% CPU for eleven months so that one Tuesday in November does not fall over. The finance director wants to know why the cloud would be cheaper when the sticker price per hour looks worse. Answering that means separating what is fixed from what is variable, and counting the costs an invoice never shows.
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Cheat Sheet: AWS Security and Compliance
A final-review sheet for CLF-C02 Domain 2: the shared responsibility model and how it shifts by service, identity and access management, the root user, encryption, and the services that detect, audit and report. Thirty per cent of the scored content, condensed.
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The Patch That Nobody Owned
A critical vulnerability lands in a library that appears in five places across one estate: on EC2 instances, inside an RDS engine, under a Lambda function, in a Fargate task image, and in a third-party appliance from AWS Marketplace. Most of them need the company to act by Friday. One does not, and one splits in two depending on how the library got there. The shared responsibility model is what tells them apart.
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One Login and Eleven People
A startup has grown to eleven engineers and still signs in to AWS with the account root credentials, kept in a shared password manager. An access key from that identity is in a build script. Nobody can say who deployed anything, and the first audit is in six weeks. Untangling it is a lesson in what identities exist and what each one is for.
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Four Findings and Four Different Services
A health-tech company has four security questions on one page: is anything malicious happening, do our instances carry known vulnerabilities, is there patient data in the wrong bucket, and are we drifting off the standard we told the auditor we follow. Four questions, four different services, and the way to tell them apart is what each one reads.
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Two Encryption Choices and One Service Out of Scope
A Perth company moving a case-management platform for a Commonwealth agency into AWS has three things to settle before the assessor arrives: encrypt 14TB of scanned records properly, answer a finance director who thinks the locked cage in the leased data centre was safer, and confirm that every service in the design sits inside the compliance programme the platform is assessed against. One of them does not.
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Cheat Sheet: Cloud Technology and Services
A final-review sheet for CLF-C02 Domain 3: ways to reach AWS, the global infrastructure, and the compute, storage, database, network, AI/ML, analytics, integration and developer services, with the one-line job each of them does. The largest domain, and the one that is mostly recall.
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Three Copies in One Building
A booking platform runs three web servers, a database and its standby, and all of it sits in one Availability Zone. The team believes it is redundant. A four-hour power event in that zone proves otherwise. Fixing it means being precise about what a Region is, what an Availability Zone is, and which problem an edge location solves.
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Five Ways to Run the Same Container
A media company has four workloads and one team: an image resizer triggered by uploads, a licensed transcoding engine, a steady web API, and an overnight rendering job. Every one of them could technically run on an EC2 instance. Only one of them should, and the reason is different in each case.
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Six Petabytes and Nobody Knows Which Drawer
A genomics institute has six petabytes spread across five kinds of data: sequencer output being processed right now, a shared analysis workspace, results served to a public portal, twenty years of raw reads kept for regulatory reasons, and a scratch area rebuilt nightly. One storage service is wrong for all five, and the discriminator is how the data is reached rather than how big it is.
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A Table That Fits and One That Does Not
A ride-hailing company runs everything in one PostgreSQL database: bookings, driver location updates arriving forty thousand a second, session tokens, and the analytics queries that lock the whole thing up every morning at nine. Four workloads in one engine is the problem. Splitting them is a lesson in what each database service is actually for.
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A Subnet, a Gateway and a Route Nobody Wrote
A charity moves its donation platform into a VPC and nothing works: the web tier is unreachable, the application servers cannot fetch patches, and the nightly backup to S3 has been failing since the move. The obvious fix to the first of those would put a database full of donor records on a public path. Four symptoms, four different pieces of VPC plumbing, and each one is a component with a specific job.
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Cheat Sheet: Billing, Pricing and Support
A final-review sheet for CLF-C02 Domain 4: the compute purchasing options and when each fits, storage and data transfer charges, the billing and cost management tools, AWS Organizations and cost allocation tags, the Support plans and their response times, and the partner and technical resources.
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A Question Nobody on the Team Could Answer
An eleven-person company in Adelaide spends an afternoon on a problem nobody can solve, and works out halfway through that the real difficulty is not knowing who to ask. Five more questions arrive over the next month, and each one has a different route: a support case, a page AWS has already written, somebody else's software, or a partner with hands on the work.
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The Same Instance at Four Prices
A market research firm runs 180 instances, all of them On-Demand, and finance wants the bill down without anything being switched off. The estate divides into four groups with completely different demand shapes, and the same instance type is available at four different rates depending on what you are prepared to commit to. What each group can honestly commit to decides the rate it gets.
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One Bill, Nine Teams and Nobody to Ask
A software company with nine product teams gets one AWS invoice a month, and nobody can say which team spent what. A finance business partner wants chargeback, a team lead wants warning before they overspend, and the platform lead wants a support response within the hour rather than the next business day. Three different tools, and one organisational change underneath all of them.
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A Domain-by-Domain Checklist for the Cloud Practitioner Exam
The Cloud Practitioner paper scores four domains, from Cloud Technology and Services at 34% down to Billing, Pricing and Support at 12%. This is the whole track on one page, sorted into those four: the cheat sheet that anchors each domain, the situations to work through, and the quizzes and cards to drill. Tick your way down, and wherever a line still feels shaky, that is the next half hour of revision.
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One subject a card: the five things that matter, when to pick it over the alternative, and why it is the wrong answer when it is.
Exam Room · Cloud Practitioner
Flash Card: The AWS Well-Architected Framework
Six pillars, a named set of design principles under each, lenses for particular workload types, and a console tool that turns the questions into an improvement plan. Reach for it whenever a scenario describes a property of a design.
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Flash Card: The Shared Responsibility Model
AWS secures the cloud; the customer secures what they put in it. The line between the two moves with the service, and three responsibilities never move at all. Security and Compliance carries 30% of the scored content, and this model sits underneath all of it.
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Flash Card: AI, Machine Learning and Analytics Services
Two catalogues to know by recognition rather than depth: the AI services that each do one task, and the analytics services that move, query and visualise data. Learn them by the job each one does in a sentence.
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Flash Card: Integration, Developer and End-User Services
The rest of the catalogue: messaging and events, developer tools, business applications, virtual desktops, frontend hosting and IoT. Each one is recognised by the single job it does.
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Exam-style multiple choice, one question a card, with the reasoning behind the tempting wrong answer.
Exam Room · Cloud Practitioner
Pop Quiz: Elasticity, Scalability and Agility
A ticketing platform adds capacity when a sale opens and releases it two hours later, with no human involved, and the charges stop when the capacity goes. Which benefit of the cloud is that?
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Pop Quiz: What Only the Root User Can Do
Four of these five tasks an AdministratorAccess identity can do. One of them nobody can do without signing in as the root user, and it is not the one most study notes name.
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Pop Quiz: CloudTrail, Config and CloudWatch
A security group that should allow port 443 from one address range is found allowing 0.0.0.0/0. Two questions follow: what does this security group look like now compared to last month, and who made the call that changed it? They are answered by two different services.
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