Introduction
This article will explore all the free resources out there to prepare for AWS Cloud Practitioner exam. Will dive as deep as possible to understand and learn all the concepts of AWS. Main goal is not pass the exam but have a deeper understanding of all the AWS services so it can help us to pass this CLF-C02 exam. I will provide all the free resources links at the bottom of the article and also on the fly as we move forward.
Disclaimer: This post is not affiliated to AWS or any other services. Just a guide for my future-self and anyone who is looking to know more about the exam.
Understanding the Cloud Practitioner exam
Even though the exam topics are quite rudimentary, but this exam is absolutely vital step for an overall understanding of AWS itself. That is why AWS guides everyone to pass or attend this exam first.
According to the AWS provided official exam guide:
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) exam is intended for individuals who
can effectively demonstrate overall knowledge of the AWS Cloud, independent of a
specific job role.
The exam validates a candidate’s ability to complete the following tasks:
- Explain the value of the AWS Cloud.
- Understand and explain the AWS shared responsibility model.
- Understand security best practices.
- Understand AWS Cloud costs, economics, and billing practices.
- Describe and position the core AWS services, including compute, network,
database, and storage services.- Identify AWS services for common use cases
So, this exam is targeted for all the tech and non-tech candidates out there. It is not hugely technical, but some previous exposer to the AWS services are necessary/ recommended.
To put it simply, this exam will help one to understand the services, economics, concepts, fundamentals etc but not dives into coding, cloud design, testing and other technical concepts. AWS has different types of certification for those.
I highly recommend following AWS provided guide for deeper understanding of why this exam is useful, or if it is for you at all!
Exam categories and what to expect
In this exam, we need to know four main categories of AWS. According to their official guide:
The exam has the following content domains and weightings:
- Domain 1: Cloud Concepts (24% of scored content)
- Domain 2: Security and Compliance (30% of scored content)
- Domain 3: Cloud Technology and Services (34% of scored content)
- Domain 4: Billing, Pricing, and Support (12% of scored content)
So to put simply, there are four main domains in this exam which will be marked from. But those are only the tip of the iceberg. Under those domains, there will be lots of technical and non-technical concepts. During this exam, you will not be doing any:
- Coding
- Cloud Architecture Design
- Troubleshooting
- Implementation
- Load and performance testing
Some services and concepts in this exam might seem familiar and some may not. But with some perseverance and few learning tricks, one can certainly overcome this somewhat difficult process. It may seem very daunting and intimidating at first, but from my experience once one starts to swim around the concepts and domains it gets much easier progressively.
The exam itself is 90 minutes long and it contains 65 questions. There are two types of questions on the exam:
- Multiple choice: Has one correct response and three incorrect responses (distractors)
- Multiple response: Has two or more correct responses out of five or more response options
I highly recommend exploring more about the exam in the AWS provided Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam guide here or here.
So how long it takes to learn all those?
It depends on one’s previous experience and knowledge, really. If you come from “IT” background, then it will take less time to learn. It also depends on your research, materials, learning speed, agility etc. Personally, the main problem I faced was to learn all the services abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms. And link them with what they do. Some are easy to remember and some will take some time for sure. Not to mention AWS comes up with bizarre and fanciful names for their services which I am pretty sure their own management have to look up on Google sometimes.
Note: I will prepare an AWS Glossary somewhere later in the post if it has any helps :)
Anyway, keep in mind that process might be difficult, but certainly very much possible to overcome. So give yourself some time and see how you feel. Usually people with some IT background can finish this exam prep within 4–6 weeks, but I have also seen colleagues done it in a week. I was a bit sceptical and passed within two weeks of the start, spending some long mundane days on my desk.
Prep step 1: Finding materials
First thing first, I would highly recommend attending to this AWS provided official free course here. You might need to register first (which is also free). The course is self-paced and 7 hours long, and you can use this course as your anchor point. What I mean by that is, to learn something new, I usually use one source as my anchor point. I try to understand and learn from that particular source as much as I can, but I certainly know that I would not be understanding everything from it. Whatever I don’t understand, I go to another source or try to do a deep research and then come back to my original source / anchor point and see if I can understand it now. If I am still unclear, I try to find a new source or material and go through this iterative process until I am absolutely clear on that. Most often than not, this process gives me fresh perspective and a new angle to understand something difficult. But that is me, please feel free to explore your own ideas of learning new stuff. Also, I have a blog post about how I learn new technical concepts if you are interested.
Anyway, Please sign up to that free course and see how you feel. Also, not to mention, there are hundreds of other paid and free courses on this topic on the internet. Even AWS has their own subscription based (paid) course for this exam, so please do your own research and see what suits you the best 🙂
Personally, I liked AWS provided materials more because I think it has most updated info with pretty much detailed explanations. Also, I liked their attention to details, which is my personal preference. For an example, I liked the way they detail in the course quiz about why certain answers are wrong. Here is a screenshot:
Prep Step 2: Hands-on labs
I think it is imperative to have some sort of hands-on lab experience when anyone wants to learn the most out of this preparation. If you already have some level of AWS experience, then good for you! If you are completely new to this concept, then I highly recommend opening an AWS account (which is also free, but you need a debit/credit card for billing purposes for future usage) before you move further in your learning journey. You can find how to open an account here.
It will massively boost your knowledge even by simply browsing through the services and help to know more about how they work. And AWS has a lot of services, and I mean A LOT! From simple virtual machine like EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud), S3(Simple Storage Solution) to mind-blowing services like hiring a Quantum Computer (Amazon Bracket), or even a Satellite (AWS Ground Station) and everything in between! That’s what makes AWS a pioneer in Cloud Computing field in the industry. And I think it is very exciting to know all about them, which will also help one to prep for this exam and beyond.
Here is an example of how AWS account console might look like:
Note: Be careful after gaining an AWS account, cause unknowingly you can incur some charges in your account. Bear in mind, some services are free and some are not! But feel free to look around :)
Helpful study notes
AWS Jargons and Terminologies
Instances: You can run multiple virtual machines on a single computer, but when you run virtual machines in the cloud environment or in this case in AWS, they are known as instances.
Container: A container is a standard unit of software that contains application code and all relevant dependencies. Example: Docker
Container Cluster: A logical grouping of container instances that you can place tasks on.
AWS Glossary : Services Initialisms and What They Do
Group by: Compute Services
Amazon EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud
Most fundamental service in AWS and backbone of cloud computing. EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service for launching and managing Linux/UNIX and Windows Server as virtual machine instances in Amazon data centres.
Amazon ECS: Elastic Container Service
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a highly scalable, fast, container management service that you can use to run, stop, and manage Docker containers on a cluster of EC2 instances.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Easy App Deployment Service for Developers
Elastic Beanstalk is a service for deploying and scaling web applications and services. Upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment—from capacity provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling to application health monitoring.
Amazon EKS:
AWS Lambda: Write Serverless Code
It is not a compute service then is it? Well it is actually.! All the underlying components (servers) are manged by AWS so deveolpers can upload, run or test their code. The service runs and scales your code, including setting up automatic triggers to call other AWS services. Supported languages: Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby. It also provides a Runtime API, allowing you to use any additional programming languages.
Group by: Storage Services
Important links
Resources from Official AWS (in English)
AWS provided CLF-C02 exam guide here
AWS provided free official CLF-C02 course here
AWS Fundamental: Overview here // Good read
Whitepaper: Overview of Amazon Web Services here // Very important for all level
AWS provided mock question set here
Third party Resources
Note: This post is under active development..
