CLF-C02 Domain 3 - Cloud Technology and Services
Domain 3 is 34% of the scored AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam. It tests access/deployment methods, global infrastructure, and service selection across the current in-scope catalog.
3.1 Deploy and operate
- Use the AWS Management Console for interactive work, AWS CLI/AWS SDKs/APIs for programmatic work, and AWS CloudFormation for repeatable infrastructure as code.
- Deployment models are cloud, on-premises, and hybrid. AWS Outposts, AWS Direct Connect, AWS VPN, and AWS Storage Gateway are common hybrid building blocks.
3.2 Global infrastructure
- A Region is a geographic area; an Availability Zone is one or more isolated data centers inside a Region; an edge location caches or processes content closer to users.
- Use multiple AZs for high availability. Use multiple Regions for disaster recovery, global latency, business continuity, or data-sovereignty needs.
- Amazon CloudFront caches content at edge locations; AWS Global Accelerator improves network path and availability for supported applications.
3.3 Compute
- Amazon EC2 gives VM control; AWS Lambda runs event-driven functions; AWS Fargate runs containers without managing servers.
- Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is AWS-native orchestration; Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is managed Kubernetes.
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supplies elasticity within an ASG; AWS Auto Scaling is the separate, broader service that unifies scaling plans across EC2 Auto Scaling groups, ECS, DynamoDB, and Aurora. Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) distributes requests and performs health-based routing.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk deploys applications onto managed AWS resources; Amazon Lightsail provides simplified bundles; AWS Batch schedules batch jobs.
3.4 Databases
- Relational: Amazon RDS and cloud-optimized Amazon Aurora.
- NoSQL key-value/document: Amazon DynamoDB. Document-compatible: Amazon DocumentDB. Graph: Amazon Neptune.
- In-memory: Amazon ElastiCache. Data warehouse: Amazon Redshift.
- AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) moves/replicates database data; AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) or current DMS Schema Conversion converts heterogeneous schemas.
3.5 Networking
- Amazon VPC supplies isolated networks, subnets, routes, gateways, security groups, and network ACLs.
- Amazon Route 53 provides DNS, registration, and health-check routing.
- AWS Site-to-Site VPN connects networks over IPsec; AWS Client VPN connects individual users; AWS Direct Connect is dedicated private connectivity.
- AWS Transit Gateway is a hub for many VPCs/networks; AWS PrivateLink privately exposes services through interface endpoints.
3.6 Storage
- Object: Amazon S3 and archival Amazon S3 Glacier classes.
- Block: Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for EC2 and ephemeral instance store.
- File: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) for elastic NFS and Amazon FSx for managed third-party file systems.
- Hybrid/cache: AWS Storage Gateway. Central backup policy: AWS Backup. Server recovery: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.
3.7 AI/ML and analytics
- Managed tasks: Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, Amazon Q, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Textract, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Translate. Amazon Kendra has dropped off the current in-scope list.
- Custom ML lifecycle: Amazon SageMaker AI.
- Query/process/analyze: Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Redshift.
3.8 Other categories
- Messaging/event/workflow: Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions.
- Business apps: Amazon Connect, Amazon SES.
- Developer tools: AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, AWS X-Ray.
- End-user computing: Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon WorkSpaces, Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser.
- Frontend/mobile: AWS Amplify is the only in-scope entry; AWS AppSync has dropped off the current list. IoT: AWS IoT Core.