Cloud Foundations – WGU D282 (Cloud Concepts, 2025 Edition) | Full Study Guide and Reference with All Key Terms, Explanations, and Step-by-Step Learning Support for Mastering Cloud Computing Fundamentals

Private Cloud

A cloud delivery model that is exclusively used by an organization.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Which 3 basic factors drive customer costs, regardless of the product or pricing model?

Compute, storage, and outbound data transfer.

What is the term for the costs associated with moving your IT infrastructure to a cloud solution?

Cost of Cloud Migration

What is the concept to reduce the amount of latency that occurs on an application and the IOPS for applications with large reader processes?

Caching

Which security option is used to validate a user's identity on a network by substantiating two or more identity factors?

MFA

What do you need to design for when creating a resilient system architecture on AWS cloud?

Design for failure

Which two costs are reduced when an organization moves to a cloud deployment?

Capital Expenses (CapEx) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Which architectural design principle focuses on computing resources operating efficiently?

Performance Efficiency

Which type of VPC is created when your original account is created?

A default Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

What is it called when you determine the overall cost of your current on-premises system and use it as benchmark for going into the cloud?

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Which feature of Amazon EC2 is designed to closely mimic an actual data center, but with a scalable infrastructure?

An Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Which migration strategy involved changing certain application components for purposes of improving a cloud deployment without changing the main underlying application core?

Replatforming

What is the term used to describe increasing the number of resources available to support your applications, such as adding more instances to meet demand?

Horizontal Scaling

Which term refers to the costs, principles, and overall benefits of cloud computing?

Cloud Economics

What does AWS define as a unique geographic area of the world that is independent from other locations?

A region

What is the term used to describe increasing the specifications of an individual resource, such as adding more RAM or CPU to an instance?

Vertical Scaling

Which pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework refers to running effective workloads and gaining insight into their operations?

Operational Excellence

What is a cloud economic factor that is used for calculating capital costs, cost of your current data center, labor costs, and other operational costs?

Benchmarking

Which term refers to the ability to change an AWS architecture without modifying the design?

Scalability

What is a logical entity that gives you the ability to create subnets, modify IP address ranges, change network gateways, configure routing tables, and modify advanced security settings to build your own logical network?

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Which feature automatically replicates date from one AWS region to another and create a global distribution of sustained data?

Cross-Region Replication

Which pillar of the Well-Architectured Framework is focused on the stability of AWS systems and their ability to support business value with long uptimes and durable systems?

Reliability Pillar

Which perspective of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework helps a company's HR department to ensure company teams are prepared for moving to the cloud?

The People Perspective

Which term describes a tightly coupled or single-threaded system architecuture?

Monolithic

Which pillar of the Well-Architected Framework supports the improvement and efficiencies of an AWS infrastructure over a complete lifetime?

Cost Optimization

Which cloud delivery model shares infrastructure and applications between an on-premise environment and a cloud?

Hybrid Cloud

Which system architecture ensures that all the components of the system are loosely coupled?

Microservices-based

In cloud computing, what is the term used to describe payments done only for resources consumed?

Pay As You Go (PAYG)

How does using AWS Managed Services result in cost savings to businesses?

It reduces human error, requires fewer staff to maintain operations, frees us staff to focus on business development, and improves operational efficiency.

What architectural design principle focuses on monitoring systems to deliver business value by improving procedures and processes?

Operational Excellence

Which type of load balancer is made to distribute traffic based on HTTPS and HTTP workloads?

Application Load Balancer

What are the 6 foundational capabilities addressed by the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework?

Business, People, Governance, Platform, Security, and Operations

What is the term for the ability to scale your computing resources to match consumer demand without having to provision resources manually?

Elasticity

Which security policy requires data to be encrypted before being written to disk?

AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

What will you use to implement parallelization when creating an application for the cloud?

Multi-threading

Which key feature of AWS Cloud reduces the time, costs, and errors associated with manual processes?

Using automation