Cloud computing and cloud services like AWS have surely made our lives thousand times easier. Forgot to save an important file you were working on? Cloud to the rescue. No more storage space on your computer or hard drive? Cloud to the rescue. Lost your data somehow and struggling to retrieve it? Cloud to the rescue. All these are only a few examples of what the cloud is actually capable of doing.
If you’re someone who is trying to work in the cloud and are familiar with AWS, chances are you’d find it extremely overwhelming. Why? Because much like technology, AWS is ever-evolving, with over 200+ services as of 2021 and with more in store every year! Additionally, if you’re looking to crack the AWS-certified cloud practitioner exam, there are certain things you need to know. This AWS certified cloud practitioner study guide will tell you all the AWS cloud practitioner essentials you need to know. you need to know.
Who should take the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam?
AWS skills are highly useful in today’s day and age, especially since more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies make use of AWS as per Webisoft. Since AWS is not widely taught in schools or universities, you might have to rely on other online/offline resources to learn relevant in-demand skills. Eventually, you need to get a certification to then use on your Cloud Computing Resume to showcase your skills. The AWS Cloud certification is widely accepted everywhere for jobs when people venture into the cloud.
Additionally, taking the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam would be a smooth ride if you have a basic understanding of how AWS works, say about half a year of exposure to the AWS cloud. A basic understanding of the link between IT services and AWS coupled with the knowledge of certain mainstream services included in AWS can go a long way as well.
This AWS cloud practitioner exam guide is going to make preparing for AWS cloud practitioner exam extremely smooth for you. We also talk about online courses that you can take with all the essential AWS cloud practitioner learning materials you need.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Overview
1. Level of Difficulty
The AWS cloud practitioner certification, CLF-C01, is considered the easiest of all AWS certifications and the level is foundational. This automatically makes it highly useful and necessary for people looking to get into the cloud domain to take this exam.
2. Exam length
Are you wondering how long is AWS cloud practitioner exam? The exam duration is 90 minutes - one and a half hours.
3. Cost
For any commoner to take the CLF-C01 exam, they will have to pay a fee of USD 100, equivalent to INR 8,235.04 as of October 2022.
4. Format
The exam contains a total of 65 questions that are of either multiple choice or multiple response types. In a typical multiple-choice question, there is only one correct response out of the given options. However, there are two or more correct responses in a multiple-response question out of five or more options.
5. Delivery Method
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam can be taken from a center or held online as a proctored exam. Websites like Pearson VUE and PSI Exams offer this exam.
6. Languages
The AWS Cloud Practitioner exam is offered in a number of languages - English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Latin American Spanish. Additional languages that you can take the exam in include Spain Spanish and Traditional Chinese, which are offered only on Pearson VUE.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Study Guide
Although the exam level is foundational, without the required practice and time spent on the domains being covered in the exam, beginners who are just getting into the cloud can find it difficult to crack it. This is exactly where an AWS CCP Study Guide like this one can be highly useful. We are going to be looking at various details of this exam and a detailed step-by-step process on how to prepare for this exam and ace it.
1. Know the Exam Content
In the aforementioned 65 questions, the exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. Information about the candidate’s performance is collected through this unscored content and is scored for future reference without having any effect on the final score.
The result is either a pass or a fail. The scores are scaled to a number between 100 and 1000, and the minimum passing score is 700. This scaling is done to equate the scores across different exam forms with different difficulty levels. While the questions are separated into different sections, you don’t need to pass every section. Only the overall score determines if you passed the exam or not.
Now that we have covered the questions’ content, we are now going to look at the nature of the questions and what domains are being covered. Read till the end of this AWS cloud practitioner exam guide to learn more about the AWS certified cloud practitioner learning path and how many questions are on AWS cloud practitioner exam, and other such queries in mind.
2. Understand the Domains Covered
Given below is a table with the weightage percentages of each domain being focused on the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam.
| S. No. | Domain | Weightage (in %) |
|---|
| 1 | Cloud Concepts | 26 |
| 2 | Security and Compliance | 25 |
| 3 | Technology | 33 |
| 4 | Billing and Pricing | 16 |
The following is a breakdown of all the aforementioned domains as published on the official website of AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam:
Domain 1: Cloud Concepts
1.1 AWS Cloud and its value proposition
List out and explain the benefits of the AWS cloud, including but not limited to the following:
- Security
- Reliability
- High Availability
- Elasticity
- Agility
- Pay-as-you go pricing
- Scalability
- Global Reach
- Economy of scale
Elaborate on how AWS Cloud allows users to focus on business values
- Shifting technical resources to revenue-generating activities as opposed to managing infrastructure
1.2 Aspects of AWS Cloud economics
Define items that would be part of a Total Cost of Ownership proposal
- Understand the role of operational expenses (OpEx)
- Understand the role of capital expenses (CapEx)
- Understand labor costs associated with on-premises operations
- Understand the impact of software licensing costs when moving to the cloud
Identify the operations that reduce expenses by making the switch to the cloud
- Right-sized infrastructure
- Benefits of automation
- Reduce compliance scope (for example, reporting)
- Managed services (for example, RDS, ECS, EKS, DynamoDB)
1.3 List and explain different cloud architecture design principles given below:
- Design for failure
- Decouple components versus monolithic architecture
- Implement elasticity in the cloud versus on-premises
- Think parallel
Domain 2: Security and Compliance
2.1 AWS shared responsibility model
- Recognize the elements of the Shared Responsibility Model
- Describe the customer’s responsibilities on AWS (Describe how the customer’s responsibilities may shift depending on the service used - with RDS, Lambda, or EC2, for example)
- Describe AWS responsibilities
2.2 Define AWS Cloud security and compliance concepts
Identify where to find AWS compliance information
- Locations of lists of recognized available compliance controls (for example, HIPPA, SOCs)
- Recognize that compliance requirements vary among AWS services
At a high level, describe how customers achieve compliance on AWS
- Identify different encryption options on AWS (for example, In transit, At rest)
Describe who enables encryption on AWS for a given service
Recognize there are services that will aid in auditing and reporting
- Recognize that logs exist for auditing and monitoring (do not have to understand the logs)
- Define Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail
Explain the concept of least privileged access
2.3 Identify AWS access management capabilities
Understand the purpose of User and Identity Management
- Access keys and password policies (rotation, complexity)
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Groups/users
- Roles
- Policies managed policies compared to custom policies
- Tasks that require the use of root accounts Protection of root accounts
2.4 Identify resources for security support
Recognize there are different network security capabilities
- Native AWS services (for example, security groups, Network ACLs, AWS WAF)
- 3 rd party security products from the AWS Marketplace
Recognize there is documentation and where to find it (for example, best practices, whitepapers, official documents)
- AWS Knowledge Center, Security Center, a security forum, and security blogs
- Partner Systems Integrators
Know that security checks are a component of AWS Trusted Advisor
Domain 3: Technology
3.1 Define methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud
Identify at a high level different ways of provisioning and operating in the AWS cloud
- Programmatic access, APIs, SDKs, AWS Management Console, CLI, Infrastructure as Code
Identify different types of cloud deployment models
- All in with cloud/cloud native
- Hybrid
- On-premises
Identify connectivity options
- VPN
- AWS Direct Connect
- Public internet
3.2 Define the AWS global infrastructure
Describe the relationships among Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations
Describe how to achieve high availability through the use of multiple Availability Zones
- Recall that high availability is achieved by using multiple Availability Zones
- Recognize that Availability Zones do not share single points of failure
Describe when to consider the use of multiple AWS Regions
- Disaster recovery/business continuity
- Low latency for end-users
- Data sovereignty
Describe at a high level the benefits of Edge Locations
- Amazon CloudFront
- AWS Global Accelerator
3.3 Identify the core AWS services
Describe the categories of services on AWS (compute, storage, network, database)
Identify AWS compute services o Recognize there are different compute families
- Recognize the different services that provide computing (for example, AWS Lambda compared to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon EC2, etc.)
- Recognize that elasticity is achieved through Auto Scaling
- Identify the purpose of load balancers
Identify different AWS storage services
- Describe Amazon S3
- Describe Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
- Describe Amazon S3 Glacier
- Describe AWS Snowball
- Describe Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
- Describe AWS Storage Gateway
Identify AWS networking services
- Identify VPC
- Identify security groups
- Identify the purpose of Amazon Route 53
- Identify VPN, AWS Direct Connect
Identify different AWS database services
- Install databases on Amazon EC2 compared to AWS managed databases
- Identify Amazon RDS
- Identify Amazon DynamoDB
- Identify Amazon Redshift
3.4 Identify resources for technology support
- Recognize there is documentation (best practices, whitepapers, AWS Knowledge Center, forums, blogs)
- Identify the various levels and scope of AWS support
- AWS Abuse
- AWS support cases
- Premium support
- Technical Account Managers
- Recognize there is a partner network (marketplace, third-party), including Independent Software Vendors and System Integrators
- Identify sources of AWS technical assistance and knowledge, including professional services, solution architects, training and certification, and the Amazon Partner Network
- Identify the benefits of using AWS Trusted Advisor
Domain 4: Billing and Pricing
4.1 Compare and contrast the various pricing models for AWS (for example, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instance pricing)
- Identify scenarios/best fit for On-Demand Instance pricing
- Identify scenarios/best fit for Reserved-Instance pricing o Describe Reserved-Instances flexibility o Describe Reserved-Instances behavior in AWS Organizations
- Identify scenarios/best fit for Spot Instance pricing
4.2 Recognize the various account structures in relation to AWS billing and pricing
- Recognize that consolidated billing is a feature of AWS Organizations
- Identify how multiple accounts aid in allocating costs across departments
4.3 Identify resources available for billing support
- Identify ways to get billing support and information
- Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Amazon QuickSight, third-party partners, and AWS Marketplace tools
- Open a billing support case
- The role of the Concierge for AWS Enterprise Support Plan customers
- Identify where to find pricing information on AWS services
- AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
- AWS Services product pages
- AWS Pricing API
- Recognize that alarms/alerts exist
- Identify how tags are used in cost allocation
While the topics under each domain might seem too much and overwhelming, careful preparation and consistent learning can help anyone ace this exam with flying colors. We will now look at more details to help you prepare better.
3. Set Your Preparation Timeline
Due to the differences in the learning paces and prerequisites that various exam takers have, we can’t quite figure out how long it will take for you to finish the entire syllabus for the exam. But for a beginner with only a fundamental understanding of the cloud, we can say that it will take anywhere between two to six months.
Make sure you plan ahead and get a head start in your preparations so that you can be stress-free as the exam approaches. Preparing a timeline for your studies can aid you well regarding this.
4. Review the Previous Exams for Question Types and Difficulty
Preparations should not only be knowledge-centered but also exam-oriented. After getting a good grasp of the concepts involved in the syllabus, it’s crucial to practice previous years’ question papers and sample papers. You can apply the age-old 80-20 rule here - dedicate 80 percent of your time to grasp the concepts intuitively and spend the rest 20 percent of your time solving papers.
This will not only help you understand the question types and analyze the difficulty level but will also let you know about the frequently asked question models. As you solve more and more papers, your time management skills will also improve. This brings us to the next step.
5. Read the Best Preparation Books
Picking and Choosing a Book to help you with exams among thousands of books available both online and offline can be difficult. It’s advised to check user reviews and see how famous a particular preparation book is before buying and learning concepts from it. Having separate books for different purposes is also important. A book that focuses on concepts might not efficiently cover the question models and vice versa. Either buy two types of books - one for concepts and another for sample questions or go for an all-encompassing preparation book.
In addition to reading the best preparation books, you can also share cheat notes with your peers who are taking the same exam to stay on top of things. This not only makes you understand other perspectives and think differently but also gives room for improvement.
6. Practice New and Previous Questions in Exam-like Scenarios
Since the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is taken online, it’s crucial to try and test out the platforms on which the exam is going to happen. This might include installing certain software, plug-ins, and the like. It’s also important to manage your time efficiently to answer all 65 questions in the given time frame. This is where taking mock tests with timers is highly useful.
You can either go online and take a mock test from any of the training program websites or have a personal timer and track how long you’re taking to solve every question model. This will give you insights into the specifics and will help you improve on weak areas. One key aspect to acing this exam is proper AWS practitioner exam practice.
7. Take Certification Training Programs
Self-learning is not everyone’s cup of tea. Most people need an external nudge or help to sit and learn concepts and ace exams like the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam. This is where taking up certification training programs, whether offline or online like the one KnowledgeHut provides, comes in handy.
Courses prepared by experts in the field with inputs from people who have given and aced the exam are highly useful. In addition to aiding with your preparations, these training programs teach you everything you need to know within a short span of time. So even if you are a little late to the preparation party, worry not! You also get to learn at your own pace if you choose to opt for online training programs.
As per the official website of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam, the following key topics (in no particular order) are likely to be covered in the exam. Please bear in mind that this isn’t an exhaustive list, and it is subject to change.
- APIs
- Cost Explorer
- AWS Cost and Usage Report
- AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
- Elastic Load Balancers
- Amazon EC2 instance types (for example, Reserved, On-Demand, Spot)
- AWS global infrastructure (for example, AWS Regions, Availability Zones) Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
- AWS Management Console
- AWS Marketplace
- AWS Professional Services
- AWS Personal Health Dashboard
- Security groups
- AWS Service Catalog
- AWS Service Health Dashboard
- Service quotas
- AWS software development kits (SDKs)
- AWS Support Center
- AWS Support tiers
- Virtual private networks (VPNs)
Tips For Preparation
If you are in need of some tips for your AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam, you are at the right place. Let’s now look at some tips to follow before and during the exam.
Before the Exam Tips
- Make sure you clear your mind completely before you start reading and grasping the concepts every day. This will help you work more efficiently than otherwise.
- Try not to be overwhelmed by the number of domains/topics covered in the exam. Tackling a huge situation becomes extremely easier once broken down into small instantaneous situations. Split the domains and cover them one by one.
- During the preparation stage, make sure you solve enough practice/sample question papers with timers to manage the exam time efficiently.
- Talk to peers and experts in the field and clear your doubts as and when you learn the concepts.
- Make sure you make good use of the Cloud Computing Resources Online,
During The Exam
- Get proper rest the night before the exam instead of pulling all-nighters and studying late into the night. A good night’s sleep will make your brain sharper while you’re taking the exam, which is crucial.
- If you feel you aren’t satisfied with your preparations or are not ready to give the exam, you can just reschedule it.
- If you’re not taking the test remotely but are going to a venue to take it, make sure you go early and not in the nick of time. This is to tackle any difficult situations before the exam.
- Read all the questions carefully and make sure you move on to the next questions if you don’t know the answer to one instead of being stuck with it.
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Final Word
You now have the exact idea of everything related to the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam preparation. All that’s left to do now is to sit, prepare rigorously, and ace the exam. Taking this particular exam can help you Land the Job of your Dreams in the cloud industry. Certification exams like these offset the absence of college degrees and proper education. People who are trying to make a career shift can also find this highly beneficial to them. Check out the KnowledgeHut AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification cost.
If you’re looking for well-put-together Cloud Computing Courses with Placement, we have a course for that as well. Know the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Cost, you’ll see that it’s light on your pockets! Keeping the students’ well-being in mind, our experts have curated this course for your use. Easy real-time doubt clarifications and access to our discussion forum are added advantages.
With all of that being said, we wish you all the best to do well during the exam, and you can always reach out to the experts at KnowledgeHut to clear your doubts, if any. We hope you now have all the materials and knowledge for the perfect AWS cloud practitioner certification preparation. Happy learning!
