AWS Cloud Practitioner case studies
AWS Cloud Practitioner · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is AWS's foundational, entry-level certification. It is designed for people who need to demonstrate a broad, conceptual understanding of the AWS Cloud rather than deep hands-on engineering skill - sales and marketing staff, project and product managers, finance and procurement teams, support staff, and career-changers preparing for a more technical associate-level certification. The AWS Cloud Practitioner case studies are 5 cases and about 3,757 words.
1The Lease Is Expiring: Payroll Spikes vs. a Skills-Constrained Team
A 900-person insurance firm runs a 12-year-old .NET payroll and claims application on 40 on-premises VMs, backed by SQL Server Enterprise licensed per core. Its data-center lease expires in 9 months and cannot be renewed.
738 words, about 4 min2Four Audit Findings, Two Sprints, One Security Engineer
A 250-person healthcare-adjacent SaaS company stores marketing analytics events in Amazon S3 and patient-identifiable records in an encrypted Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL database. A pre-audit review turns up four findings: (1) the CI/CD pipeline stores a long-lived IAM access key with AdministratorAccess in an environment variable; (2) one S3 bucket holding ad-creative assets allows public read via a bucket ACL; (3) the root account has no MFA and is used monthly to rotate a vendor key; (4) RDS automated backups are retained 7 days, though the written retention policy says 35.
722 words, about 4 min33.8 Seconds in Europe: Caching, Replicas, or Multi-Region?
An e-commerce company runs its storefront in us-east-1: an Application Load Balancer, an autoscaling EC2 fleet, and an Amazon Aurora MySQL writer with two readers in the same region. 62% of traffic comes from Europe and Southeast Asia, where users see p95 page loads of 3.8 seconds versus 1.1 seconds for US users.
748 words, about 4 min4A Queue Backing Up for Nine Hours While a Server Idles at 6% CPU
A media company ingests 4 million product images per month in unpredictable bursts - 300,000 in a single hour during partner uploads, then near-zero for days. Today one m5.4xlarge (16 vCPU) runs 24/7, pulling from an S3 prefix, generating three thumbnails per image with ImageMagick, and writing back to S3.
744 words, about 4 min5A Savings Plan Expiring in 45 Days and an Outage That Wasn't Support's Fault
A 400-person company runs 180 EC2 instances in one region: 120 production instances of a fixed family and size running steadily, 40 staging instances running weekdays 9–6, and 20 batch instances that are interruption-tolerant. A 3-year all-upfront Compute Savings Plan covering 100 instances expires in 45 days.
805 words, about 4 min