CLF-C02 Cheat Sheet: Cloud Practitioner Quick Reference

CLF-C02 is vocabulary-heavy: most questions are 'which service/concept is described here.' This sheet compresses the highest-frequency facts — scan it the week before the exam.

Cloud concepts

• Six cloud advantages: trade CapEx for variable expense, economies of scale, stop guessing capacity, speed/agility, stop running data centers, go global in minutes
• Well-Architected pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability
• CAF perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, Operations
• Deployment models: cloud, hybrid (Outposts, Direct Connect, VPN), on-premises

Shared responsibility model

• AWS = security OF the cloud: physical, hardware, global infrastructure, managed-service OS/patching
• Customer = security IN the cloud: data, IAM, network config, (on EC2) guest OS
• More managed = less customer responsibility: EC2 > containers > Lambda

Core services in one line

• EC2 — virtual servers; S3 — object storage; EBS — block storage for EC2; EFS — shared file storage
• RDS/Aurora — relational DB; DynamoDB — NoSQL key-value; Redshift — data warehouse
• Lambda — serverless functions; Elastic Beanstalk — deploy apps fast; ECS/EKS — containers
• VPC — your network; Route 53 — DNS; CloudFront — CDN; ELB — load balancing
• IAM — users/roles/policies; Organizations — multi-account; CloudTrail — API audit; CloudWatch — metrics/logs/alarms
• SNS — pub/sub notifications; SQS — message queue; KMS — encryption keys; WAF/Shield — web filtering/DDoS

Billing & pricing

• Cost Explorer — analyze/visualize spend & forecast; Budgets — threshold alerts on actual or forecasted spend
• Pricing Calculator — estimate BEFORE you build; CUR — raw detailed billing data to S3
• Free tier: 12-month (e.g., t2/t3.micro), always-free (e.g., Lambda 1M requests), trials
• EC2 pricing: On-Demand (flexible), Reserved/Savings Plans (1-3yr commit, up to ~72% off), Spot (interruptible, up to ~90% off), Dedicated Hosts (licensing/compliance)
• Consolidated billing (Organizations) — volume discounts pool across accounts

Support plans

• Basic — free: docs, forums, limited Trusted Advisor checks
• Developer — business-hours email, one primary contact, general guidance
• Business — 24/7 phone/chat/email, full Trusted Advisor, production guidance (NO TAM — the trap)
• Enterprise — adds a Technical Account Manager + concierge team

Last-week checklist

• Know which tool does what: CloudTrail (who did it) vs CloudWatch (how it's performing) vs Config (what changed)
• Multi-AZ = availability; read replica = scale/DR; edge location = latency
• 'Cheapest way to X' answers usually involve serverless or managed services
• Global services: IAM, CloudFront, Route 53, WAF — everything else is regional