CLF-C02 - Cloud Concepts (24% of the exam) - Section 1.6

Understand concepts of cloud economics, including fixed versus variable costs, the cost of on-premises environments, rightsizing and licensing strategies such as Bring Your Own License.

Distinguish fixed on-premises costs from the variable cost model of cloud, and apply total cost of ownership analysis to compare the two. Understand rightsizing as the practice of matching instance capacity to actual workload demand, and recognise Bring Your Own License as a strategy to reuse existing software licences in AWS.

Fixed versus variable costTotal cost of ownershipRightsizingBring Your Own License

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleCloud Conceptseasy

A company already owns valid software licences for a database engine and wants to keep using those licences on AWS instead of paying for new ones bundled into the service. Which licensing strategy supports this goal?

ABring Your Own License, applying the licences the company already owns to its AWS workloads Correct
BRightsizing the database instance so that it runs on the smallest possible compute size
CSwitching the workload to a variable cost model so the licence fee scales with usage
DTotal cost of ownership analysis to compare the on-premises and cloud licence prices

Bring Your Own License lets a company reuse software licences it already owns on AWS workloads. Bring Your Own License applies existing, paid-for software licences to cloud resources, so the company avoids buying new licences and lowers the software portion of its bill.

Why A is correct: Bring Your Own License lets a company reuse software licences it has already bought, avoiding the cost of new licences included in a service.

Why B is wrong: Rightsizing controls how much compute you pay for, but it does nothing to let the company reuse software licences it already owns.

Why C is wrong: Changing to variable pricing affects how charges accrue, not whether existing licences can be carried over to the cloud.

Why D is wrong: A total cost of ownership study compares overall costs, but it is an analysis method, not the strategy that reuses owned licences.

See more CLF-C02 practice questions, answers explained.

Exam traps in Cloud Concepts

Answers that look right on this material and are not. Each one is a distractor from a different question in the CLF-C02 bank for this domain.

A fixed cost rises and falls automatically with how much capacity the workload actually uses each month
Why it is wrong: This describes a variable cost rather than a fixed one, so the labels are swapped; a learner may confuse which term tracks usage.
Bring Your Own License, by reusing existing software licences on the running instances
Why it is wrong: Bring Your Own License reduces software licence cost, not wasted compute capacity, so it does not address instances that are simply too large.
The cost of the AWS Support plan it would later select once its workloads have been fully migrated into the cloud
Why it is wrong: This is a future AWS cost, not an on-premises expense, so it belongs to the cloud side of the comparison rather than the data centre side.

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