AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework perspectives

Six perspectives: Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations. The first three focus on business outcomes; the last three focus on technical capabilities.

Well-Architected Framework pillars

Six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The framework guides architecture reviews against best practices.

The 7 Rs of migration

Retire, Retain, Rehost, Relocate, Replatform, Repurchase, and Refactor/Re-architect. Each describes a strategy for moving a workload to AWS.

CapEx versus OpEx

Cloud computing shifts spending from upfront capital expense (buying servers) to variable operational expense based on consumption, improving cash flow and agility.

Availability Zone

One or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity within an AWS Region. Multiple AZs provide fault isolation and high availability.

Elasticity

The ability to acquire resources as needed and release them when no longer required, matching capacity to demand and avoiding overprovisioning.

Economies of scale benefit

Because AWS aggregates usage across many customers, it achieves lower per-unit costs and passes savings to customers through lower pricing.

AWS CAF transformation phases

Envision, Align, Launch, and Scale. These phases structure a cloud transformation journey from strategy through scaling adoption.

Shared responsibility model

AWS secures the cloud (facilities, hardware, hypervisor); the customer secures what is in the cloud (data, IAM, guest OS patching, firewall rules).

IAM policy evaluation logic

An explicit Deny always overrides any Allow. If no Allow and no Deny apply, the request is implicitly denied by default.

IAM role

An identity with permission policies that can be assumed temporarily by users, applications, or AWS services, avoiding long-term access keys.

Service Control Policy

An AWS Organizations policy that sets the maximum available permissions for member accounts. SCPs filter permissions but do not grant them.

AWS Artifact

A self-service portal providing on-demand access to AWS compliance reports such as SOC and ISO, plus agreements like the Business Associate Addendum.

AWS CloudTrail

A service that records AWS API calls and account activity for auditing, compliance, and operational troubleshooting across the account.

AWS Shield Standard

A managed protection service that defends against common, most frequently occurring DDoS attacks at no additional cost for all AWS customers.

KMS key policy

A resource-based policy that controls who can use and manage a KMS key. It is evaluated separately from IAM policies for key access.

Security group versus network ACL

Security groups are stateful and allow-only at the instance level. Network ACLs are stateless, allow and deny, and apply at the subnet level.

EC2 Spot Instance

Spare EC2 capacity offered at discounts up to 90% off On-Demand. Spot can be interrupted with a two-minute warning when capacity is reclaimed.

S3 durability

S3 Standard provides 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability by redundantly storing objects across multiple facilities within a Region.

AWS Lambda

A serverless compute service that runs event-driven code without provisioning servers, billed per request and per GB-second, with a 15-minute maximum timeout.

RDS Multi-AZ versus Read Replica

Multi-AZ maintains a synchronous standby for high availability and failover. Read Replicas provide asynchronous copies for read scaling.

Amazon DynamoDB

A fully managed NoSQL key-value and document database delivering single-digit millisecond latency, with on-demand or provisioned capacity modes.

Application Load Balancer

A Layer 7 load balancer for HTTP and HTTPS traffic, supporting path-based and host-based routing, plus integration with containers and Lambda.

Amazon CloudFront

A global content delivery network that caches content at edge locations to reduce latency and offload origin servers such as S3 or EC2.

Amazon VPC internet gateway

A horizontally scaled, redundant VPC component that allows communication between resources in a VPC and the internet when route tables permit.

AWS Support plan tiers

Basic, Developer, Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise. Each tier adds response times, channels, Trusted Advisor checks, and TAM access.

AWS Enterprise support response time

Enterprise support provides a 15-minute response for business-critical system down and assigns a designated Technical Account Manager to the account.

AWS Free Tier types

Always free offers (like 1 million Lambda requests monthly), 12-month free offers (like 750 hours of t2.micro), and short-term trials.

AWS Budgets

A tool to set custom cost or usage thresholds that send alerts or trigger actions when actual or forecasted spend exceeds limits.

Consolidated billing

An AWS Organizations feature combining member account usage into one bill, enabling volume discounts and simplifying payment management.

AWS Pricing Calculator

A web tool that estimates the cost of AWS services based on configuration and usage assumptions before deployment; it does not provision resources.

Data transfer charges

Inbound data transfer to AWS is generally free. Outbound data transfer to the internet and most inter-Availability-Zone traffic are charged.