At 34% of the exam, Cloud Technology and Services is the biggest CLF-C02 domain — about 22 of your 65 questions. It is also the domain with the longest list of names attached to it, which is why it feels the most intimidating. It should not. The exam is not asking you to build anything; it is asking whether you know what each service is for.
The trap is that every option is real
Here is the shape of almost every question in this domain. You are asked what distributes incoming traffic across instances, and the options are CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling and VPC. All four exist. All four are AWS services. All four are in the general vicinity of “networking and traffic”. Only one distributes traffic across instances.
That is the entire difficulty, and it is worth naming plainly, because it changes how you should study. Recognising a service name feels like knowing the answer — right up until the moment three names all look equally familiar. The defence is not more depth. It is being able to complete this sentence for each core service, in one line: “X is the service for ___.”
Get that, and the distractors stop being tempting, because you are no longer matching vibes. You are matching a job description.
Storage: three types, three services
The one mapping in this domain that repays memorising outright:
- Object storage — Amazon S3. Objects in buckets, addressed by key, reached over HTTP. Reach for it for files, backups, static assets, data lakes.
- Block storage — Amazon EBS. A virtual disk attached to one EC2 instance. It behaves like a drive because it is one.
- File storage — Amazon EFS. A shared file system that many instances mount at once.
If a question mentions a shared file system, it is EFS. A disk for one instance, EBS. Anything addressed as an object over HTTP, S3. This single distinction resolves more questions in this domain than any other fact you could learn.
Compute: how much of the server do you still own?
The compute services form a ladder, and each rung hands more of the work to AWS. EC2 gives you a virtual machine: you choose the size, you patch the guest OS, you pay while it runs. Lightsail bundles a simplified virtual private server for straightforward workloads. Containers — ECS, EKS, Fargate — package the application with its dependencies, and Fargate additionally removes the servers underneath. Lambda is the far end: you supply a function, AWS runs it on demand, and there is nothing to size, patch or pay for while it sits idle.
The exam tests the ends of this ladder more than the middle. When a question says “without provisioning or managing servers” and “pay only for what you use”, it has written Lambda’s definition into the question stem. When it says “full control over the operating system”, it has written EC2’s.
Global infrastructure: the layer questions are built on
Three concepts, and the exam checks whether you can keep them apart.
Regions are geographic areas you choose deliberately. Four things drive the choice, and the exam expects all four: compliance and data residency (some data is not legally permitted to leave a jurisdiction), latency to your users, whether the services you need are available there, and cost — prices genuinely differ by Region.
Availability Zones are one or more physically separate data centres within a Region, with their own power, cooling and networking, connected by AWS’s private low-latency links. Their independence is the whole product. Spreading a workload across AZs is the AWS answer to “what if a data centre fails” — and the reason a question about several instances in one AZ is always wrong.
Edge locations are a different layer entirely, outside the Regions and far more numerous. CloudFront caches content there; Route 53 answers DNS there. They exist to serve users faster.
The confusion the exam mines: edge locations are for speed, AZs are for availability, Regions are for reach and residency. An answer that offers CloudFront to a question about surviving a data-centre failure is a distractor built precisely on that mix-up.
Databases: relational, or not
Four database services carry the questions, and they separate cleanly once you ask what shape the data is.
Amazon RDS is the managed relational database — tables, joins, SQL, and AWS handling backups, patching and failover. Amazon Aurora is AWS’s own relational engine, compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL and built for higher performance; treat it as RDS’s faster sibling. Amazon DynamoDB is the odd one out and the most tested: fully managed, but NoSQL — key-value and document data, no joins, single-digit millisecond response at any scale. Amazon Redshift looks relational but is a data warehouse, built to run analytics across very large volumes rather than to serve transactions.
The mix-up to guard against is DynamoDB against RDS. Both are managed, so “managed database” does not decide it. The word to look for is relational: if the scenario needs tables and joins, it is RDS or Aurora; if it describes key-value lookups at massive scale, it is DynamoDB.
Amazon ElastiCache rounds the group out and is not a database at all — it is an in-memory cache that sits in front of one to make it faster.
Networking: four services, four jobs
The networking names are the most interchangeable-looking in the exam, and each has exactly one job:
- Amazon VPC — your own isolated virtual network inside AWS.
- Elastic Load Balancing — distributes incoming traffic across several targets.
- EC2 Auto Scaling — adds and removes instances as demand moves.
- Amazon Route 53 — DNS: it turns your domain name into an address.
ELB and Auto Scaling are the pair worth pinning down, because they usually appear together in real architectures and therefore together in options. ELB spreads traffic across the instances that exist. Auto Scaling changes how many exist. A question about handling a traffic spike could plausibly be either, so read what it actually asks: sharing load out is ELB, having more capacity to share it to is Auto Scaling.
How to use the questions below
Answer first, then read the explanation past the correct letter. In this domain especially, the paragraph explaining why the other three are wrong is the whole lesson — because on the real exam, all four will look just as plausible as they do here, and nobody will tell you which three were the decoys.
Updated for CLF-C02 (July 2026). The sample questions above are our own work
in the style of the exam — not real exam items. The exam itself is set and marked
by the certification body.