Cloud Technology and Services
An overview of the third AWS Cloud Practitioner domain: deploying and operating in AWS, the global infrastructure, and the core compute, storage, database, networking, AI/ML, and analytics services.
Cloud Technology and Services is the third domain of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course, and it is where the course turns from ideas to actual products. The first 2 domains gave you the language of the cloud and the security model behind it. This domain introduces the AWS services you will recognize on the exam and use in a real account, grouped by what they do.
Cloud Technology and Services is 34% of the CLF-C02 exam, the largest share of any single domain. You are not expected to configure these services in depth. The goal is to know what each one is for and when you would reach for it.
What This Domain Covers
- ways to deploy and operate in AWS: the Management Console, the AWS CLI, the SDKs, and infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation
- the AWS global infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, edge locations, and Amazon CloudFront
- compute services: Amazon EC2 and instance types, containers with ECS and EKS, serverless with Lambda and Fargate, plus load balancing and auto scaling
- storage services: Amazon S3 and its storage classes, block storage with EBS, file storage with EFS and FSx, and backup options
- database services: relational databases with Amazon RDS and Aurora, NoSQL and in-memory options, and database migration tools
- networking services: Amazon VPC and its security controls, Amazon Route 53 and DNS, and hybrid connectivity
- AI/ML and analytics services, plus other AWS categories such as application integration and developer tools
Why It Matters
This is the broadest domain, so most of its questions test recognition: given a need, which AWS service fits. Once you can match a service to a job, like Amazon S3 for object storage or Lambda for short event-driven code, these questions become quick wins rather than guesswork.
The domain also ties the rest of the course together. The Shared Responsibility Model from the security domain shifts depending on whether you run EC2, a managed database, or a serverless function. The billing and pricing domain that follows builds directly on the services you meet here, because each one has its own cost model.