Cloud Concepts: value, global infrastructure, and AWS frameworks
Cloud Concepts carries about 24% of the CLF-C02 exam and asks you to justify cloud adoption, describe how AWS is organised globally, and name the frameworks that structure a migration or a workload review. Expect scenario questions rather than definitions.
The six advantages
Trade fixed capital expense for variable expense; benefit from massive economies of scale; stop guessing capacity; increase speed and agility; stop spending money running and maintaining data centers; go global in minutes.
Frameworks
- AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) has six perspectives: Business, People, and Governance are business capabilities; Platform, Security, and Operations are technical capabilities. Security is a technical perspective - a classic trap.
- Well-Architected Framework pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.
Deployment and service models
Cloud (fully in AWS), hybrid (AWS plus on-premises, joined by Direct Connect or VPN), and on-premises (virtualised in your own facility). Service models: IaaS (EC2), PaaS (Elastic Beanstalk, RDS), SaaS (WorkMail, Chime).
Worked example
A ticketing platform sells out in four minutes when a tour is announced, then idles for weeks. Buying servers for the peak wastes money all year; buying for the average loses sales. The answer is elasticity: EC2 Auto Scaling adds instances as demand rises and removes them afterwards, and pay-as-you-go billing means idle hours cost nothing. "Reserve permanently to be safe" is scalability without elasticity - wrong when demand is spiky.
Traps
Conflating elasticity with scalability; filing Security under CAF business perspectives; forgetting Sustainability is a Well-Architected pillar; assuming the cloud removes capacity planning entirely (service quotas still need planning).