AWS Cloud Practitioner: Cloud Concepts

24 questions with the correct answer and an explanation for each. Topic: Cloud Concepts. Free, no account needed.

These questions are written from AWS’s published exam guide and service documentation. They are not real exam questions — nobody who has sat the exam may reproduce those, and any site offering them is putting your certification at risk.

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1. A company no longer makes a large hardware purchase before it starts work. Instead it pays for compute as it consumes it, as a running cost each month. Which of the six benefits of the AWS Cloud does this describe?

  1. Stop guessing capacity
  2. Benefit from massive economies of scale
  3. Trade fixed expense for variable expense
  4. Go global in minutes

Answer: C — Trade fixed expense for variable expense

Replacing a large purchase made up front with a running cost that tracks actual usage is the move from capital expenditure to operating expenditure, which is what trading fixed expense for variable expense means.

2. A business finds that its cost per server-hour keeps dropping even though its own usage hasn't changed, because its cloud provider buys hardware, power and bandwidth in bulk across hundreds of thousands of customers. What accounts for the lower price?

  1. Elasticity
  2. Economies of scale
  3. Trading fixed expense for variable expense
  4. Stopping the guesswork on capacity

Answer: B — Economies of scale

Aggregating usage across many customers lets the provider buy at a scale no single company can match, and those savings are passed on as lower prices.

3. Before launching a new product, a team can't tell whether it will need to serve 100 users or 100,000, and worries about either overpaying for idle machines or running out of room. Which benefit removes the need to make that call in advance?

  1. Stop guessing capacity
  2. Trade fixed expense for variable expense
  3. Go global in minutes
  4. Benefit from economies of scale

Answer: A — Stop guessing capacity

Cloud capacity can be scaled up or down within minutes, so the team no longer has to commit to a fixed infrastructure size before it knows the actual demand.

4. A company reassigns the staff who used to spend their time racking, stacking, and powering servers in its own facility, letting them work on the company's product instead. Which benefit does this illustrate?

  1. Increase speed and agility
  2. Go global in minutes
  3. Benefit from economies of scale
  4. Stop spending money running and maintaining data centres

Answer: D — Stop spending money running and maintaining data centres

Racking, stacking, and powering servers doesn't differentiate a business from any other, so handing that work to a provider frees effort for what does.

5. An online retailer's compute usage grows automatically during a holiday sale and shrinks back afterward, so it pays for the extra capacity only while the surge lasts. What property is being described?

  1. High availability
  2. Elasticity
  3. Agility
  4. Economies of scale

Answer: B — Elasticity

Capacity following demand up and down, so cost tracks actual usage rather than a rare peak, is the definition of elasticity.

6. A service keeps working normally for its users even after an entire facility hosting part of its infrastructure goes offline, because it also runs in another isolated location. Which property does this describe?

  1. Elasticity
  2. Agility
  3. High availability
  4. Trading fixed expense for variable expense

Answer: C — High availability

Staying usable when part of the system fails, by running across more than one isolated location, is what high availability means.

7. A team wants to know whether it can run its system smoothly day to day, monitor it effectively, and keep refining its operational processes over time. Which concern does this fall under?

  1. Reliability
  2. Operational excellence
  3. Cost optimization
  4. Performance efficiency

Answer: B — Operational excellence

Operational excellence is about running and monitoring a system and continually improving how it is operated.

8. A company needs to confirm that its customer data and systems are protected from unauthorized access. Which concern does this fall under?

  1. Security
  2. Reliability
  3. Operational excellence
  4. Sustainability

Answer: A — Security

Security is about whether the data and the systems are protected.

9. A system answers requests very quickly under normal load, but a minor network hiccup causes it to crash and stop meeting demand until someone manually restarts it. Which concern is not being met here?

  1. Cost optimization
  2. Performance efficiency
  3. Reliability
  4. Operational excellence

Answer: C — Reliability

Reliability is about recovering from failure and continuing to meet demand; being fast under normal conditions does not make a system reliable, since a system can be fast and fragile.

10. As demand grows and better-suited AWS instance types become available, a team wants to make sure it keeps using the resources that actually fit its workload rather than sticking with its original choice indefinitely. Which concern does this fall under?

  1. Reliability
  2. Sustainability
  3. Cost optimization
  4. Performance efficiency

Answer: D — Performance efficiency

Performance efficiency is about using the right resources, and still the right ones as things change.

11. A company evaluating its cloud workload wants to account for the environmental cost of running it, but a study guide from a few years back doesn't list this as one of the areas to weigh at all. Which concern is missing from that older material?

  1. Sustainability
  2. Cost optimization
  3. Performance efficiency
  4. Operational excellence

Answer: A — Sustainability

Sustainability is the newest pillar and is frequently missing from older study material.

12. A team has already read the six design principles for building systems on AWS. It now wants a report on where its own workload falls short of them. What should the team use, and why?

  1. The AWS Well-Architected Framework, because the Framework is the service that reviews a workload and reports where it falls short
  2. The AWS Well-Architected Tool, because the Tool is the service that reviews a workload and reports where it falls short
  3. The AWS Well-Architected Framework, because the Tool only lists the six pillars and does not assess a workload
  4. The AWS Well-Architected Tool, because the Tool is the set of design principles a workload is judged against

Answer: B — The AWS Well-Architected Tool, because the Tool is the service that reviews a workload and reports where it falls short

The Tool is the service you run against a workload; the Framework is the set of ideas. Options A and C put the reviewing job on the Framework, and option D puts the design principles inside the Tool, reversing the two.

13. A cloud team can technically deploy workloads without trouble, but the organisation's leadership structure and staff skills have not kept pace, slowing adoption. Which perspective addresses this gap?

  1. Operations
  2. People
  3. Security
  4. Governance

Answer: B — People

Culture, structure, leadership and skills — the bridge between technology and business — is the People perspective's concern.

14. A company wants to move its virtualized on-premises workloads to the cloud at the hypervisor level, without buying new hardware, rewriting applications, or changing how it operates. Which migration strategy is this?

  1. Relocate
  2. Rehost
  3. Replatform
  4. Refactor / re-architect

Answer: A — Relocate

Relocate is the hypervisor-level lift and shift: infrastructure moves to the cloud with no new hardware purchase, no rewriting, and no change to existing operations.

15. While moving an application to the cloud, a team switches its self-managed database to a managed database service but leaves the rest of the architecture unchanged. Which migration strategy does this describe?

  1. Repurchase
  2. Rehost
  3. Replatform
  4. Refactor / re-architect

Answer: C — Replatform

Replatforming means moving an application while making a limited optimisation along the way, such as swapping a self-managed database for a managed one.

16. A company's migration reaches a legacy system that would need major re-architecture work before it could run in the cloud. The company postpones that work and leaves the system where it is for now. Which migration strategy is this?

  1. Retire
  2. Relocate
  3. Refactor / re-architect
  4. Retain

Answer: D — Retain

Retain means leaving it where it is for now, which covers major refactoring a company wants to postpone. Retire would mean decommissioning a system that is no longer needed.

17. A company picks a migration strategy specifically because it is the fastest and least disruptive option, accepting that it will carry forward existing platform limitations and deliver the smallest improvement in return. Which strategy is this?

  1. Refactor / re-architect
  2. Rehost
  3. Replatform
  4. Relocate

Answer: B — Rehost

Rehosting is described as fastest and least disruptive, but it gains the least and carries any pre-existing platform problem across unchanged.

18. A company needs to migrate its production database to AWS while keeping the source database available and in use throughout the migration. Which service fits?

  1. Migration Evaluator
  2. AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT)
  3. AWS Application Migration Service
  4. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

Answer: D — AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)

AWS DMS moves databases while letting the source stay in use during the move, unlike SCT (schema conversion), Application Migration Service (servers), or Migration Evaluator (cost estimation).

19. A company owns a server that costs the same to keep running whether it sits idle at three in the morning or is fully loaded at noon. What kind of cost is this?

  1. Variable cost
  2. Fixed cost
  3. Economies of scale
  4. A rightsizing cost

Answer: B — Fixed cost

A cost paid regardless of usage, like a purchased server depreciating the same at any hour, is a fixed cost by definition.

20. A company estimates the cost of running its own data center by adding up only the purchase price of the server hardware it needs. Which real cost is this estimate most likely missing?

  1. The hourly rate a cloud provider charges for equivalent compute
  2. The power, cooling, and physical security for the building housing the hardware
  3. The Bring Your Own License fee for its software
  4. The AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations for resizing its instances

Answer: B — The power, cooling, and physical security for the building housing the hardware

On-premises costs extend well past hardware price to the building, power, cooling, physical security, staff, and replacement cycle.

21. An organization already holds paid-up licenses for a commercial database under an existing agreement and wants to move that database to the cloud without buying new licenses. Which licensing approach fits?

  1. Included licensing
  2. A license-tracking management tool
  3. Bring Your Own License (BYOL)
  4. Rightsizing

Answer: C — Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

BYOL lets an organization use licenses it has already paid for, rather than paying again through an included-licence instance price.

22. A team launches instances sized for anticipated peak demand, but usage data three months later shows the workload consistently needs only half that capacity. Shrinking the instances to match actual usage is an example of what?

  1. Rightsizing
  2. Economies of scale
  3. Automation
  4. Bring Your Own License

Answer: A — Rightsizing

Matching resource size to actual workload need, after capacity chosen at launch turns out to be wrong, is rightsizing.

23. An engineering team sets up automated provisioning for test environments instead of configuring each one by hand. Beyond saving staff time, what additional cost benefit does this typically bring?

  1. Fewer costly mistakes, such as a forgotten test instance left running for weeks
  2. Lower monthly fees under a Bring Your Own License agreement
  3. Complete elimination of fixed costs
  4. Less need to rightsize existing instances

Answer: A — Fewer costly mistakes, such as a forgotten test instance left running for weeks

Automation cuts cost both by saving human time and by preventing costly mistakes like a forgotten instance left running.

24. A small business pays the same low per-unit compute prices as a massive enterprise customer, without ever having to purchase hardware at that enterprise's scale itself. What accounts for this?

  1. Rightsizing
  2. Economies of scale
  3. Bring Your Own License
  4. Converting a variable cost into a fixed cost

Answer: B — Economies of scale

Economies of scale let a small customer access prices that only very large aggregate purchasing volume can normally produce.

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