I85PREP
⌘ K
CCC-A study materials
CCC-A study resources

CCC-A: Cloud Technology and Architecture

CCC-A · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Cloud Technology and Architecture

What this domain tests

Cloud Technology and Architecture tests how cloud building blocks fit together: regions and availability zones, virtualization and containers, storage types, networking, scaling, resilience, and disaster recovery. Questions often ask you to choose an architecture that meets stated RTO and RPO targets.

Core rules

  • A region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated availability zones (AZs). AZs have independent power and networking but are close enough for low-latency replication. A regional failure is not the same as an AZ failure.
  • Type 1 hypervisors run on bare metal; type 2 hypervisors run on a host OS. Virtual machines include a guest OS; containers share the host kernel and package the application and dependencies.
  • Block storage presents a volume like a disk; file storage presents a shared filesystem; object storage stores immutable objects through APIs and is not mounted as a normal disk.
  • Virtual private clouds (VPCs) provide isolated networking with subnets, route tables, and gateways. Security groups are stateful virtual firewalls; network ACLs are stateless and subnet-level.
  • Auto-scaling adjusts capacity against metrics but is not instantaneous. Serverless platforms still run on servers; the provider manages them.
  • High availability tolerates component failure; fault tolerance tolerates failure with no interruption; disaster recovery restores service after a major event. RTO is maximum acceptable downtime; RPO is maximum acceptable data loss.

Worked example

A web application needs 99.95% availability, an RTO of 15 minutes, and an RPO of 5 minutes. Deploy stateless web servers across two AZs behind a load balancer, and use a managed database with a synchronous standby in a second AZ. Configure automated failover and a tested runbook. Ship backups or transaction logs to a second region at least every five minutes for regional disaster recovery. Reasoning: multi-AZ handles an AZ failure; the 5-minute RPO sets the replication interval; the 15-minute RTO requires automated failover, not manual rebuild.

Traps that cost marks

  • Confusing an AZ with a region. Multi-AZ is not multi-region disaster recovery.
  • Treating object storage as a mountable block device.
  • Assuming auto-scaling is immediate. Instances take time to launch and warm.
  • Designing backups as high availability. Replication is not a substitute for point-in-time recovery.