CLF-C02 Concept Map (Mind Map): Domain 1, Cloud Concepts

Every topic from Domain 1 of the exam on one page, with the pairs the exam swaps to trick you. It's about 24% of your score.

1.1 Benefits of the AWS Cloud

Why companies move: the six advantages and the design goals

The six advantages of cloud computing

Trade fixed expense for variable expense: Instead of buying servers and data centers up front, you pay only for the IT you consume, when you consume it.
Benefit from massive economies of scale: AWS serves hundreds of thousands of customers, so its cost per unit is lower, and it has passed savings on through many price cuts.
Stop guessing capacity: You no longer buy servers for a guess about future demand: you start small and adjust capacity in minutes when real demand is known.
Increase speed and agility: New resources are a click away, so the time and cost to try an idea drop from weeks to minutes.
Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers: AWS does the racking, stacking and powering of servers, so your staff work on customers and products instead.
Go global in minutes: Deploy in AWS Regions around the world in a few clicks, giving users lower latency at minimal cost.

Design goals the cloud makes easy

Elasticity: Capacity grows automatically when demand rises and shrinks when it falls, so you never pay for idle servers.
Scalability: The ability of a system to handle more load by adding resources, ideally without redesign.
High availability: The service stays up with minimal downtime, typically by running in several Availability Zones so one failure does not stop it.
Fault tolerance: The system keeps working with no interruption at all when a component fails, thanks to fully redundant parts.
Agility: The speed at which a business can try, change or drop ideas, because resources are cheap to create and delete.

Global infrastructure, seen as a benefit

AWS Region: A separate geographic area with several Availability Zones. You choose where your data lives, and AWS does not move it to another Region on its own.
Availability Zone: One or more data centers with separate power and networking inside a Region. Using several zones gives high availability without building a second site.
Edge locations: Sites in many more cities than Regions, used by Amazon CloudFront and other edge services to deliver content close to users.

How you consume the cloud

Deployment models: Cloud (everything on AWS), hybrid (part on AWS, part on premises, connected) and on premises (private cloud in your own data center).
Service models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS: IaaS gives you raw servers (Amazon EC2), PaaS a managed platform for your code (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), SaaS a finished application you just use.

1.2 Design principles of the AWS Cloud

The Well-Architected Framework and its six pillars

The framework and its tools

AWS Well-Architected Framework: AWS's set of best practices and questions for designing and running workloads, organized in six pillars.
AWS Well-Architected Tool: Free console tool: you answer the framework's questions for one workload and get a list of high and medium risks to fix.
Well-Architected Lenses: Extra sets of questions for a specific technology or industry, such as serverless or machine learning, added to a review.
AWS Trusted Advisor: Inspects your account and recommends improvements in cost, security, performance, fault tolerance, operational excellence and service limits. Shown here as the classic look-alike of the Well-Architected Tool.

The six pillars

Operational excellence: Running and improving workloads well: operations as code, small reversible changes, learning from every incident.
Security: Protecting data and systems: least privilege, traceability, security at every layer, encryption, readiness for security events.
Reliability: The workload does its job correctly and recovers from failures: automatic recovery, tested recovery, scaling to meet demand.
Performance efficiency: Using computing resources efficiently to meet requirements as demand and technology change: right resource types, global reach, serverless.
Cost optimization: Delivering value at the lowest price: pay for what you use, remove idle resources, and attribute spending to teams.
Sustainability: Reducing the environmental impact of workloads: set energy goals, maximize utilization, choose efficient hardware and Regions.

Design principles that recur in questions

Loose coupling: Components talk through a buffer such as an Amazon SQS queue, so one failing part does not stop the others.
Remove single points of failure: Run redundant copies across Availability Zones so no single server or zone can bring the workload down.
Disposable resources: Treat servers as replaceable: rebuild them from code or images instead of repairing them by hand.
Scale out rather than up: Add more instances of the same size behind a load balancer (horizontal) instead of moving to one bigger instance (vertical).
Democratize advanced technologies: Use managed AWS services for hard technologies, such as machine learning, instead of building that skill in house.

1.3 Benefits of and strategies for migration to the AWS Cloud

Cloud Adoption Framework, the 7 Rs and the help AWS offers

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF)

AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: AWS guidance that helps an organization identify and build the capabilities it needs for a successful cloud transformation, grouped in six perspectives.
Business perspective: Makes sure cloud investments speed up digital transformation and deliver measurable business outcomes.
People perspective: Culture, organization, leadership and skills: training staff and managing the change.
Governance perspective: Runs the cloud program to maximize benefits and minimize risk: program management, benefits tracking, risk and cloud financial management.
Platform perspective: Builds the technical foundation: landing zone, architecture, deployment pipelines.
Security perspective: Confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and workloads: identity, detection, protection, incident response.
Operations perspective: Delivers cloud services at the agreed level: monitoring, incidents, patching and day-to-day running.
CAF business outcomes: The four outcomes CAF names: reduced business risk, improved environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, increased revenue, increased operational efficiency.

Migration strategies: the 7 Rs

Rehost (lift and shift): Move servers to AWS as they are, for example virtual machines onto Amazon EC2, and optimize later.
Relocate: Move a whole virtualized environment at the hypervisor level, for example VMware workloads into a VMware environment on AWS, without new hardware or code changes.
Replatform (lift, tinker and shift): Move with a few optimizations but the same architecture, for example self-managed MySQL to Amazon RDS for MySQL.
Refactor (re-architect): Rebuild the application with cloud-native features, such as microservices on AWS Lambda, to gain scale or agility.
Repurchase (drop and shop): Replace the application with a different product, usually SaaS, such as moving an on-premises CRM to a SaaS CRM.
Retain (revisit): Keep the application where it is for now, because it is not ready, too recent or not worth moving yet.
Retire: Switch off applications nobody needs any more, which cuts cost before the move.

Resources for the migration journey

AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP): A program for large migrations that combines a methodology (assess, mobilize, migrate and modernize), AWS expertise, tools and funding such as credits.
AWS Professional Services and AWS Partners: AWS's own consultants, and partner firms, who plan and carry out migrations with the customer.
AWS Prescriptive Guidance: Free library of strategies, guides and patterns for migrating and modernizing, written from AWS experience.
AWS Transform: AWS's AI agent service for migration and modernization: it assesses, plans and helps move workloads such as VMware, mainframe and .NET applications.
AWS Transform MGN (formerly AWS Application Migration Service): Replicates servers continuously to AWS, then launches them on Amazon EC2 with a short cutover. Renamed on June 8, 2026.
AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS): Moves databases to AWS while the source keeps running, replicating changes continuously until a short cutover. Its Schema Conversion feature converts between database engines.
AWS DataSync: Copies files and objects online from on-premises storage to AWS storage services, quickly and on a schedule.
AWS Data Transfer Terminal: Physical AWS sites where you bring your own storage devices and upload large datasets at high speed. Older study material uses AWS Snowball for this, now closed to new customers.

1.4 Concepts of cloud economics

What really costs money on premises and on AWS

Fixed and variable costs

Capital expense (CapEx): Money spent up front on assets such as servers or storage arrays, sized for a future peak and paid even if unused.
Operating expense (OpEx): Ongoing spending for what you use each month, such as AWS usage charges.
Paying for idle capacity: An on-premises cluster sized for a yearly peak keeps costing power, space and maintenance even when mostly unused.

Comparing on premises with AWS

Costs of an on-premises environment: Hardware, plus power, cooling, floor space, network, hardware refresh and the staff who maintain it all.
Total cost of ownership (TCO): The full cost of running a workload over time, including hidden costs like facilities and staff, used to compare on premises with AWS.
AWS Pricing Calculator: Free web tool to estimate the monthly cost of services before you use them. Covered in Domain 4; shown here because TCO questions offer it.
Undifferentiated heavy lifting: Work every company must do but that gives no advantage, such as patching hardware or running data centers. AWS takes it over.
Managed services: AWS runs the infrastructure, patching and backups of services like Amazon RDS or Amazon EKS, so your team spends less time on operations.

Licensing strategies

Bring your own license (BYOL): Use software licenses you already own, such as SQL Server with Software Assurance, on AWS, sometimes on EC2 Dedicated Hosts when the license is tied to physical servers.
License-included pricing: The software license is part of the hourly price of the instance or database, with no license paperwork.
Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts: A physical server used only by you, so licenses counted per socket or core can be brought to AWS.
AWS License Manager: Tracks software licenses you use on AWS and on premises, and enforces license limits.

Spending less over time

Rightsizing: Matching instance types and sizes to the real workload, for example moving to smaller instances that never pass 15 percent CPU.
Benefits of automation: Infrastructure as code, such as AWS CloudFormation, builds environments quickly and identically, saving staff time and avoiding errors.
Pay-as-you-go: Pay for each service by the hour, second or request, with no long-term contract unless you choose a discount commitment.

Part of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Kit: Concept Maps, Flashcards and practice questions. Also free: the Domain 1 flashcards. New to the exam? Read the CLF-C02 study guide.