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Good Luck with the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam!
I passed the AWS CCP with few days of review and without spending any money other than the exam cost. I developed these notes for those who are trying to get into Cloud. If you're on github and looking for this type of content - that's great!
The AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification (CLF-C02) is a valuable accreditation for anyone looking to gain comprehensive knowledge about the multitude of AWS offerings. AWS boasts a staggering array of over 200 fully-featured services that cater to a wide spectrum of technologies, industries, and use cases. This diversity makes it an indispensable component of any organization's digital transformation journey.
This contains all the relevant information on the new AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam
The new exam domains for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) test are as follows:
- Domain 1: Cloud Concepts 24%
- Domain 2: Security and Compliance 30%
- Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services 34%
- Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support 12%
Take note that the Cloud Practitioner exam significantly increased its coverage in Security & Compliance domain. This seems to be the trend in the previously iterated AWS certification exam, where the security-related component of the test is increased. From 25%, the CLF-C02 exam now constitutes 30% of security-related topics.
There are also 2 previous CLF-C01 exam domains that were renamed. The “Technology” domain is now called “Cloud Technology & Services” while “Billing and Pricing” has been modified to “Billing, Pricing and Support”
The list of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam topics can be found in the official CLF-C02 exam guide. These topics are divided into domains and per task statement:
Knowledge of:
- Value proposition of the AWS Cloud
Skills in:
- Understanding the economies of scale (for example, cost savings)
- Understanding the benefits of global infrastructure (for example, speed of deployment, global reach)
- Understanding the advantages of high availability, elasticity, and agility
Knowledge of:
- AWS Well-Architected Framework
Skills in:
- Understanding the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework (for example, operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability)
- Identifying differences between the pillars of the Well-Architected Framework
Knowledge of:
- Cloud adoption strategies
- Resources to support the cloud migration journey
Skills in:
- Understanding the benefits of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) (for example, reduced business risk; improved environmental, social, and governance [ESG]performance; increased revenue; increased operational efficiency)
- Identifying appropriate migration strategies (for example, database replication, use of AWS Snowball)
Knowledge of:
- Aspects of cloud economics
- Cost savings of moving to the cloud
Skills in:
- Understanding the role of fixed costs compared with variable costs
- Understanding costs that are associated with on-premises environments
- Understanding the differences between licensing strategies (for example, Bring Your Own License [BYOL] model compared with included licenses)
- Understanding the concept of rightsizing
- Identifying benefits of automation (for example, provisioning and configuration management with AWS CloudFormation)
- Identifying managed AWS services (for example, Amazon RDS, Amazon Elastic Container Service [Amazon ECS], Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [Amazon EKS], Amazon DynamoDB)
Knowledge of:
- AWS shared responsibility model
Skills in:
- Recognizing the components of the AWS shared responsibility model
- Describing the customer’s responsibilities on AWS
- Describing AWS responsibilities
- Describing responsibilities that the customer and AWS share
- Describing how AWS responsibilities and customer responsibilities can shift, depending on the service used (for example, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2)
Knowledge of:
- AWS compliance and governance concepts
- Benefits of cloud security (for example, encryption)
- Where to capture and locate logs that are associated with cloud security
Skills in:
- Identifying where to find AWS compliance information (for example, AWS Artifact)
- Understanding compliance needs among geographic locations or industries (for example, AWS Compliance)
- Describing how customers secure resources on AWS (for example, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Shield)
- Identifying different encryption options (for example, encryption in transit, encryption at rest)
- Recognizing services that aid in governance and compliance (for example, monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch; auditing with AWS CloudTrail, AWS Audit Manager, and AWS Config; reporting with access reports)
- Recognizing compliance requirements that vary among AWS services
Knowledge of:
- Identity and access management (for example, AWS Identity and Access Management [IAM])
- Importance of protecting the AWS root user account
- Principle of least privilege
- AWS IAM Identity Center (AWS Single Sign-On)
Skills in:
- Understanding access keys, password policies, and credential storage (for example, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager)
- Identifying authentication methods in AWS (for example, multi-factor authentication [MFA], IAM Identity Center, cross-account IAM roles)
- Defining groups, users, custom policies, and managed policies in compliance with the principle of least privilege
- Identifying tasks that only the account root user can perform
- Understanding which methods can achieve root user protection
- Understanding the types of identity management (for example, federated)
Knowledge of:
- Security capabilities that AWS provides
- Security-related documentation that AWS provides
Skills in:
- Describing AWS security features and services (for example, security groups, network ACLs, AWS WAF)
- Understanding that third-party security products are available from AWS Marketplace
- Identifying where AWS security information is available (for example, AWS Knowledge Center, AWS Security Center, AWS Security Blog)
- Understanding the use of AWS services for identifying security issues (for example, AWS Trusted Advisor)
Knowledge of:
- Different ways of provisioning and operating in the AWS Cloud
- Different ways to access AWS services
- Types of cloud deployment models
- Connectivity options
Skills in:
- Deciding between options such as programmatic access (for example, APIs, SDKs, CLI), the
- AWS Management Console, and infrastructure as code (IaC)
- Evaluating requirements to determine whether to use one-time operations or repeatable processes
- Identifying different deployment models (for example, cloud, hybrid, on-premises)
- Identifying connectivity options (for example, AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect, public internet)
Knowledge of:
- AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations
- High availability
- Use of multiple Regions
- Benefits of edge locations
- AWS Wavelength Zones and AWS Local Zones
Skills in:
- Describing relationships among Regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations
- Describing how to achieve high availability by using multiple Availability Zones
- Recognizing that Availability Zones do not share single points of failure
- Describing when to use multiple Regions (for example, disaster recovery, business continuity, low latency for end users, data sovereignty)
- Describing at a high level the benefits of edge locations (for example, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator)
Knowledge of:
- AWS compute services
Skills in:
- Recognizing the appropriate use of different EC2 instance types (for example, compute optimized, storage optimized)
- Recognizing the appropriate use of different container options (for example, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS)
- Recognizing the appropriate use of different serverless compute options (for example, AWS Fargate, Lambda)
- Recognizing that auto scaling provides elasticity
- Identifying the purposes of load balancers
Knowledge of:
- AWS database services
- Database migration
Skills in:
- Deciding when to use EC2 hosted databases or AWS managed databases
- Identifying relational databases (for example, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora)
- Identifying NoSQL databases (for example, DynamoDB)
- Identifying memory-based databases
- Identifying database migration tools (for example AWS Database Migration Service [AWS DMS], AWS Schema Conversion Tool [AWS SCT])
Knowledge of:
- AWS network services
Skills in:
- Identifying the components of a VPC (for example, subnets, gateways)
- Understanding security in a VPC (for example, network ACLs, security groups)
- Understanding the purpose of Amazon Route 53
- Identifying edge services (for example, CloudFront, Global Accelerator)
- Identifying network connectivity options to AWS (for example, AWS VPN and Direct Connect)
Knowledge of:
- AWS storage services
Skills in:
- Identifying the uses for object storage
- Recognizing the differences in Amazon S3 storage classes
- Identifying block storage solutions (for example, Amazon Elastic Block Store [Amazon EBS], instance store)
- Identifying file services (for example, Amazon Elastic File System [Amazon EFS], Amazon FSx)
- Identifying cached file systems (for example, AWS Storage Gateway)
- Understanding use cases for lifecycle policies
- Understanding use cases for AWS Backup
Task Statement 3.7: Identify AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) services and analytics services.
Knowledge of:
- AWS AI/ML services
- AWS analytics services
Skills in:
- Understanding the different AI/ML services and the tasks that they accomplish (for example, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lex, Amazon Kendra)
- Identifying the services for data analytics (for example, Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue and Amazon QuickSight)
Knowledge of:
- Application integration services of Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
- Business application services of Amazon Connect and Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)
- Customer engagement services of AWS Activate for Startups, AWS IQ, AWS Managed Services(AMS), and AWS Support
- Developer tool services and capabilities of AWS AppConfig, AWS Cloud9, AWS CloudShell, AWS CodeArtifact, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeStar, and AWS X-Ray
- End-user computing services of Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon WorkSpaces
- Web Frontend web and mobile services of AWS Amplify and AWS AppSync
- IoT services of AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass
Skills in:
- Choosing the appropriate service to deliver messages and to send alerts and notifications
- Choosing the appropriate service to meet business application needs
- Choosing the appropriate service for AWS customer support
- Choosing the appropriate option for business support assistance
- Identifying the tools to develop, deploy, and troubleshoot applications
- Identifying the services that can present the output of virtual machines (VMs) on end-user machines
- Identifying the services that can create and deploy frontend and mobile services
- Identifying the services that manage IoT devices
Knowledge of:
- Compute purchasing options (for example, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Savings Plans, Dedicated Hosts, Dedicated Instances, Capacity Reservations)
- Data transfer charges
- Storage options and tiers
Skills in:
- Identifying and comparing when to use various compute purchasing options
- Describing Reserved Instance flexibility
- Describing Reserved Instance behavior in AWS Organizations
- Understanding incoming data transfer costs and outgoing data transfer costs (for example, from one Region to another Region, within the same Region)
- Understanding different pricing options for various storage options and tiers
Knowledge of:
- Billing support and information
- Pricing information for AWS services
- AWS Organizations
- AWS cost allocation tags
Skills in:
- Understanding the appropriate uses and capabilities of AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and
- AWS Billing Conductor
- Understanding the appropriate uses and capabilities of AWS Pricing Calculator
- Understanding AWS Organizations consolidated billing and allocation of costs
- Understanding various types of cost allocation tags and their relation to billing reports (for example, AWS Cost and Usage Report)
Knowledge of:
- Resources and documentation available on official AWS websites
- AWS Support plans
- Role of the AWS Partner Network, including independent software vendors and system integrators
- AWS Support Center
Skills in:
- Locating AWS whitepapers, blogs, and documentation on official AWS websites
- Identifying and locating AWS technical resources (for example AWS Prescriptive Guidance, AWS Knowledge Center, AWS re:Post)
- Identifying AWS Support options for AWS customers (for example, customer service and communities, AWS Developer Support, AWS Business Support, AWS Enterprise On-Ramp Support, AWS Enterprise Support)
- Identifying the role of Trusted Advisor, AWS Health Dashboard, and the AWS Health API to help manage and monitor environments for cost optimization
- Identifying the role of the AWS Trust and Safety team to report abuse of AWS resources
- Understanding the role of AWS Partners (for example AWS Marketplace, independent software vendors, system integrators)
- Identifying the benefits of being an AWS Partner (for example, partner training and certification, partner events, partner volume discounts)
- Identifying the key services that AWS Marketplace offers (for example, cost management, governance and entitlement)
- Identifying technical assistance options available at AWS (for example, AWS Professional Services, AWS Solutions Architects)
- Official CLF-C02 Exam Guide
- Official CLF-C02 Question Set via AWS Skill Builder
- Free AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course
- Free AWS Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Video Course
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Practice Exams
- AWS Certified Cloud Practioner AWS Homepage for CPC certification. Download sample questions and the exam guide.
- AWS Web Services Overiew : Whitepaper that describes the full offering from AWS. This is an important paper to read and remember before the test.
- Crushing the aws ccp exam An amazing article on
crushing the aws cpc examrecommended resources linked. - YouTube freeCodeCamp freeCodeCamp video is good to review to ensure a full understanding of the broader scope.
- AWS training and certification has CLF-001 sample exam questions here
- Study4Exam Practice Test Collection of 612 practice questions covering all core exam topics comprehensively.
Out of scope: Business Applications, design, code, implementation, troubleshooting, migration, load testing etc.
Image Source: Prateek Katyal (Paypal support link)
A few questions to get you warmed up!
- What is the value of the cloud?
- What is the AWS shared responsibility model?
- What are AWS security best practices?
- How would you estimate AWS Cloud for your workloads before migration?
- What are the economics of the cloud?
- What are AWS billing practices?
- What are the core AWS services offered?
- What are the compute options offered by AWS ?
- What are the network options offered by AWS?
- What are the database technologies offered by AWS?
- What are the various storage options on AWS?
- What are the common use-cases that AWS can support?
- What is a Service Control Policy?
- What is a Security Group?
- What is a NACL?
- What is EC2?
- What is an IG?
- What is a Subnet?
- What is a VPC?
- How do you access an EC2 instance?
- How to ensure high availability across EC2 instances?
- How to create a hybrid cloud architecture?
- What is a storage gateway?
- What is ELB?
- What is EFS?
- What is S3?