Amazon Web Services CLF-C02 - AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

According to theAWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud, including Amazon S3. This infrastructure includes hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services.

A. Configure an S3 Lifecycle policy: Incorrect, as configuring S3 Lifecycle policies to manage object lifecycle (e.g., transitioning objects to different storage classes or deleting them after a certain period) is the customer's responsibility.

B. Activate S3 Versioning: Incorrect, as enabling S3 Versioning is a customer responsibility for managing data protection.

C. Configure S3 bucket policies: Incorrect, as setting and managing S3 bucket policies to control access is the customer's responsibility.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Shared Responsibility Model

Amazon S3

AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows developers to model and provision their AWS infrastructure in a repeatable and declarative way, using code and templates. AWS CloudFormation enables developers to define the resources they need for their development and production environments, such as compute, storage, network, and application services, and automate their creation and configuration. AWS CloudFormation also provides features such as change sets, nested stacks, and rollback triggers to help developers manage and update their infrastructure safely and efficiently12. References:

AWS CloudFormation

What is AWS CloudFormation?

One of the key advantages of cloud computing is the ability totrade fixed expenses (like data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses. With AWS, companies pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources they use, rather than investing heavily in on-premises infrastructure upfront. This reduces capital expenditure and helps lower overall costs.

Why other options are not suitable:

A. Go global in minutes: Refers to the ability to quickly deploy applications around the world, but does not directly reduce upfront costs.

B. Increase speed and agility: Refers to the ability to quickly scale and deploy resources, but is not directly related to cost reduction.

C. Benefit from massive economies of scale: Refers to AWS's ability to lower costs by leveraging its scale, but the primary advantage for reducing upfront costs is moving from fixed to variable expenses.

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 is responsible for protecting the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud, such as the global network, the hardware, the software, and the facilities. The customer is responsible for properly configuring the security of the provided service, such as the guest operating system, the application software, the data, and the network traffic. For abstracted services, such as Amazon RDS, AWS operates the infrastructure layer, the operating system, and the database software, while the customer is responsible for managing their data, classifying their assets, and using IAM tools to apply the appropriate permissions12.

Therefore, the tasks that are the customer’s responsibility are:

Perform client-side data encryption: The customer is responsible for encrypting their data before sending it to AWS, and decrypting it after receiving it from AWS. This ensures that the data is protected in transit and at rest. AWS provides various encryption options, such as AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS CloudHSM, and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)3.

Configure IAM credentials: The customer is responsible for creating and managing IAM users, groups, roles, and policies that control the access to AWS resources and services. IAM credentials include user names, passwords, access keys, and permissions4.

The tasks that are not the customer’s responsibility are:

Establish the global infrastructure: AWS is responsible for building and maintaining the global network of regions, availability zones, and edge locations that provide low latency, high availability, and fault tolerance for the AWS Cloud5.

Secure edge locations: AWS is responsible for protecting the physical security of the edge locations, which are sites that deliver cached content to end users with improved performance6.

Patch Amazon RDS DB instances: AWS is responsible for applying patches and updates to the operating system and the database software of the Amazon RDS DB instances, which are managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Amazon Aurora. References:

Shared Responsibility Model - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Shared responsibility model - Amazon Web Services: Risk and Compliance

Encryption - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What Is IAM? - AWS Identity and Access Management

Global Infrastructure - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon CloudFront Features - Content Delivery Network (CDN)

[What Is Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)? - Amazon Relational Database Service]

AWS Security Hub is a cloud security posture management (CSPM) service that performs security best practice checks, aggregates alerts, and enables automated remediation. Security Hub collects findings from the security services enabled across your AWS accounts, such as intrusion detection findings from Amazon GuardDuty, vulnerability scans from Amazon Inspector, and sensitive data identification findings from Amazon Macie. Security Hub also collects findings from partner security products using a standardized AWS Security Finding Format, eliminating the need for time-consuming data parsing and normalization efforts. Customers can designate an administrator account that can access all findings across their accounts. References: AWS Security Hub Overview, AWS Security Hub FAQs

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) is a set of best practices, tools, and guidance that helps organizations get started with cloud technologies. AWS CAF helps organizations identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, evaluate and improve their cloud readiness, and iteratively evolve their transformation roadmap. AWS CAF groups its capabilities in six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. Each perspective comprises a set of capabilities that functionally related stakeholders own or manage in the cloud transformation journey1

AWS Managed Services (AMS) is a service that operates AWS infrastructure on behalf of customers, providing a secure AWS Landing Zone, features that help meet various compliance program requirements, a proven enterprise operating model, on-going cost optimization, and day-to-day infrastructure management. AMS does not help customers identify and prioritize business transformation opportunities or evaluate their cloud readiness2

AWS Well-Architected Framework is a set of six pillars and lenses that help cloud architects design and run workloads in the cloud. It provides a consistent approach for customers and AWS Partners to evaluate and implement designs that scale with their needs. AWS Well-Architected Framework helps customers understand the pros and cons of decisions they make while building systems on AWS, but it does not help them identify and prioritize business transformation opportunities3

AWS Migration Hub is a tool that lets customers discover, plan, and track their existing servers and applications for migration to AWS. It offers journey templates, cross-team collaboration, application and server discovery, strategy recommendations, orchestration and simple dashboard. AWS Migration Hub simplifies the migration and modernization process, but it does not help customers identify and prioritize business transformation opportunities or evaluate their cloud readiness4

AWS CloudTrailis a service that enables governance, compliance, and operational 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. CloudTrail logs provide a history of AWS API calls for your account, including those made by the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command-line tools, and other AWS services. In this case, AWS CloudTrail will help the administrator identify which user deleted the resources by reviewing the event history that records details such as which user performed the action, the time of the action, and which resources were affected.

B. Amazon Inspector: Incorrect, as it is a security assessment service that helps identify vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices, not for tracking user activity.

C. Amazon GuardDuty: Incorrect, as it is a threat detection service that monitors malicious activity and unauthorized behavior, not specifically for tracking changes made by users.

D. AWS Trusted Advisor: Incorrect, as it provides best practices and guidance for cost optimization, security, fault tolerance, and performance, not for logging user actions.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS CloudTrail

AWS Organizationsis a service that helps users centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts. With AWS Organizations, a company can consolidate billing and receive a single bill for all AWS accounts under an organization, making it easier for the finance team to track costs.

Why other options are not suitable:

B. AWS Trusted Advisor: Provides real-time guidance to help optimize AWS resources, not for consolidated billing.

C. Cost Explorer: A tool for visualizing and managing AWS costs and usage, but it does not consolidate billing.

D. AWS Budgets: Allows setting custom budgets and alerts but does not consolidate billing across accounts.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is the primary service for migrating Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers to AWS, and it supports migration from one AWS Region to another. It automates the process of replicating and converting the source servers (including their applications, configurations, and data) to run natively on AWS. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) is for migrating databases, AWS DataSync is for data transfer, and AWS Migration Hub provides a single location to track migration tasks across multiple AWS services but does not perform the migration itself.

Cost allocation tags are an AWS feature that allows for detailed tracking of cloud costs by tagging resources. These tags can be customized to represent departments, projects, or cost centers, enabling organizations to allocate and monitor expenses accurately. By using cost allocation tags, companies can create reports that break down costs by tag, providing granular insights into their cloud spending. This feature is critical for achieving detailed cost management and is a core part of AWS’s billing and cost management offerings.

AWS SDKs are a set of tools that allow users to connect with AWS and deploy resources programmatically. AWS SDKs provide libraries, code samples, documentation, and other resources to help users write code that interacts with AWS APIs. AWS SDKs support various programming languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, Node.js, Go, and more. AWS SDKs make it easier for users to access AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and more, from their applications. AWS SDKs also handle tasks such as authentication, error handling, retries, and data serialization, so users can focus on their application logic .

The other options are not AWS services or tools that give users the ability to connect with AWS and deploy resources programmatically. Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence service that lets users create and share interactive dashboards and visualizations1. AWS PrivateLink is a service that enables users to securely access services hosted on AWS in a scalable and cost-effective manner2. AWS Direct Connect is a service that establishes a dedicated network connection between a user’s premises and AWS3.

Amazon Lexis a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. It provides the tools necessary to create, test, and publish intelligent chatbots that can be integrated with web applications to provide a conversational experience.

A. Amazon Textract: Incorrect, as it is a service for extracting text and data from documents, not for creating chatbots.

C. AWS Glue: Incorrect, as it is a data integration service used for preparing and transforming data.

D. Amazon Rekognition: Incorrect, as it is an image and video analysis service.

AWS Cloud References:

Amazon Lex

Amazon EC2 instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your EC2 instance. This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer. Instance store is ideal for temporary storage of information that changes frequently, such as buffers, caches, scratch data,and other temporary content. It can also be used to store temporary data that you replicate across a fleet of instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers. An instance store consists of one or more instance store volumes exposed as block devices. The size of an instance store as well as the number of devices available varies by instance type and instance size. The virtual devices for instance store volumes are ephemeral[0-23]. Instance types that support one instance store volume have ephemeral0. Instance types that support two or more instance store volumes have ephemeral0, ephemeral1, and so on. Instance store pricing Instance store volumes are included as part of the instance’s usage cost. The data on an instance store volume persists even if the instance is rebooted. However, the data does not persist if the instance is stopped, hibernated, or terminated. When the instance is stopped, hibernated, or terminated, every block of the instance store volume is cryptographically erased. Therefore, do not rely on instance store volumes for valuable, long-term data. If you need to retain the data stored on an instance store volume beyond the lifetime of the instance, you need to manually copy that data to more persistent storage, such as an Amazon EBS volume, an Amazon S3 bucket, or an Amazon EFS file system. There are some events that can result in your data not persisting throughout the lifetime of the instance. The following table indicates whether data on instance store volumes is persisted during specific events, for both virtualized and bare metal instances1. References: Amazon EC2 instance store - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

TheAWS Developer Supportplan is the lowest-cost AWS Support plan that provides basic guidance and technical support for running production workloads. It offers 24/7 access to AWS customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and access to a limited set of Trusted Advisor checks. This plan is ideal for non-critical workloads or early development phases but provides lower levels of support compared to the Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise plans.

B. Enterprise On-Ramp: Incorrect, as it is a higher-cost support plan designed for production workloads needing more guidance and technical support.

C. Enterprise: Incorrect, as it is the most expensive support plan, providing a Technical Account Manager and other premium support features.

D. Business: Incorrect, as it provides comprehensive support for production workloads but is more expensive than the Developer plan.

AWS Cloud References:

AWS Support Plans

For workloads running 24/7 for a year, Standard Reserved Instances provide a significant discount compared to On-Demand pricing. Choosing the "All Upfront" payment option maximizes the cost savings as AWS offers the highest discount for upfront payments. Convertible Reserved Instances provide flexibility to change the instance type but usually at a slightly higher cost than Standard Reserved Instances. Compute Savings Plans offer cost savings, but in this scenario, the best optimization would be a combination of Standard Reserved Instances with All Upfront payment. Spot Instances are not suitable due to their interruptible nature.