CLF-C02 Service Cheat-Sheet: The 40 AWS Services You Must Recognize on Sight

Why service recognition matters more than you think

The CLF-C02 exam is 65 questions in 90 minutes — that's about 80 seconds per question. Roughly a third of the questions follow the pattern: "Which AWS service does X?" If you have to think for more than 10 seconds about what a service even is, you're losing the question before you read the answers.

This cheat-sheet covers the 40 services that account for the vast majority of service-recognition questions on the current exam. Memorize the one-line definitions. You don't need the deep architecture — just enough to recognize the service and rule out the wrong answers fast.

Compute (you'll see all of these)

• EC2 — virtual machines. IaaS. You manage the OS.
• Lambda — serverless functions. Pay per invocation + duration. No servers to manage.
• Elastic Beanstalk — PaaS. Upload code, AWS handles the runtime, scaling, and infrastructure.
• ECS / EKS — container orchestration (ECS is AWS-native, EKS is managed Kubernetes).
• Fargate — serverless containers. Use with ECS or EKS when you don't want to manage nodes.
• Auto Scaling — automatically add/remove EC2 capacity based on load.
• Lightsail — simplified compute + storage bundles for small workloads (think: cheaper, simpler EC2).

Storage

• S3 — object storage. Buckets, unlimited scale, the default answer for "store files/backups/static assets."
• EBS — block storage attached to an EC2 instance. Like a virtual hard drive.
• EFS — file system shared across multiple EC2 instances. Linux only.
• FSx — managed file systems for Windows, Lustre, NetApp.
• S3 Glacier — archival storage. Cheap, retrieval takes minutes to hours.
• Storage Gateway — hybrid: on-prem servers talking to AWS storage.
• Snowball / Snowmobile — physical devices to move TBs or PBs of data into AWS.

Networking

• VPC — your private network in AWS.
• Route 53 — DNS service. Domain registration + routing.
• CloudFront — CDN. Caches content at Edge Locations.
• Direct Connect — dedicated private network link from on-prem to AWS.
• API Gateway — managed front door for APIs. Often paired with Lambda.

Databases

• RDS — managed relational databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, Aurora).
• Aurora — AWS's cloud-native MySQL/Postgres-compatible engine. Faster than vanilla RDS.
• DynamoDB — managed NoSQL. Key-value + document. Single-digit millisecond latency.
• ElastiCache — managed Redis or Memcached.
• Redshift — data warehouse. Petabyte-scale analytics.

Security, identity, compliance

• IAM — Users, Groups, Roles, Policies. Identity for AWS itself.
• IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) — single sign-on across AWS accounts.
• Cognito — identity for your application's end users (sign-up / sign-in).
• KMS — managed encryption keys.
• Secrets Manager — store and rotate secrets (DB passwords, API keys).
• Shield — DDoS protection. Standard is free, Advanced is paid.
• WAF — web application firewall. Filters HTTP requests by rule.
• GuardDuty — threat detection by analyzing logs.
• Macie — discovers and protects sensitive data in S3 (PII, credit cards).
• Inspector — vulnerability scanning for EC2 / containers.
• Trusted Advisor — automated best-practice checks (cost, security, performance).

Management and billing

• CloudWatch — metrics, logs, alarms. The default answer for "monitor X."
• CloudTrail — audit log of every API call in the account.
• Config — track resource configuration over time, evaluate against compliance rules.
• AWS Budgets — set spending limits and get alerted when you cross them.
• Cost Explorer — visualize and analyze past AWS spend.
• AWS Organizations — manage multiple AWS accounts under one umbrella, set service control policies (SCPs).
• CloudFormation — infrastructure as code. Templates define resources.

How to use this list

The night before the exam, read this top-to-bottom twice. During the exam, when you see a service name, you want it to trigger the one-line definition automatically. Reading the question first, then matching to a service is too slow. Recognition has to be reflex.

If you want to drill recognition under timed conditions, the Quizify CLF-C02 exam bank uses these same services in scenario form — and the answer review shows you which category each one belongs to.