Amazon Web Services began its Global Certification Program in 2013 with the primary purpose of validating the technical skills and knowledge of IT Professionals in building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using the AWS Cloud. On April 2013, AWS launched its first-ever AWS Certification test called the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. This was followed by the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator and AWS Certified Developer Associate exams.

Amazon has been continuously expanding and updating its certification program year after year. They launched a series of Professional and Specialty-level certifications that cover various topics like DevOps, machine learning, data analytics, advanced networking, and many others. As the number of AWS services increases, a new and updated version of the AWS certification exam is released regularly to reflect the recent service changes and include the new knowledge areas.

On December 2017, AWS launched its entry-level certification test called the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. This exam is recommended for professionals with a non-technical background and individuals who are quite new to the IT industry, including college students and fresh graduates. The Cloud Practitioner exam checks your understanding of the different cloud concepts, cloud terminologies, AWS services, and other basic topics in AWS. It has an exam code of CLF-C01 and has no prerequisites – meaning you can take it directly without having to earn any prior certification, degree, or training.

In order to pass the exam, you should be familiar with the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Domains and the related exam topics for this certification test.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 exam has 4 different domains, each with corresponding weight and topic coverage.

The exam domains are as follows:

• Domain 1 is Cloud Concepts.
• Domain 2 is Security and Compliance.
• Domain 3 is Technology.
• And lastly, Domain 4 is Billing and Pricing.

These are the four exam domains that you should prepare for if you are planning to take this test. The list of exam domains can be found in the official Exam Guide for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. Each exam domain has a corresponding weighting so some sections can have more or fewer questions than others. One exam domain is comprised of several task statements. A task statement is a sub-category of the exam domain that contains the required cloud concepts, knowledge, and skills for you to accomplish a particular task or activity in AWS.

Let’s look at each of these domains one by one:

The first domain covers 26% of the exam, followed by the second domain, which covers 25%, the third is a whopping 33%, while the last one covers 16% of the exam.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains – Cloud Concepts

The “Cloud Concepts” exam domain is focused on the fundamental cloud computing topics in AWS. You should know and understand the benefits of using AWS Cloud over a physical on-premises data center, including its business value in terms of scalability, global reach, and economy of scale. Be sure to brush up on the economics of cloud computing, where you have to factor in the total cost of Ownership, operational expenses, or OPEX, as well as capital expenses, or CAPEX. Cloud architecture design principles are also covered under this domain. Again, this domain covers 26% of the Cloud Practitioner exam and is the second-biggest exam domain; thus, you have to allocate ample time to review this segment.

The series of scenarios that you will encounter in this section checks your know-how in:

• Defining the AWS Cloud and its value proposition

• Identifying aspects of AWS Cloud economics, and

• Explaining the different cloud architecture design principles

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains – Security and Compliance

The second exam domain focuses on Amazon’s various security and compliance topics. For this one, you have to review the different security concepts in AWS, such as its access management capabilities, compliance controls, and the AWS shared responsibility model. You should be familiar with the best practice of granting the least privileged access to mission-critical AWS resources for your internal staff as well as the external partners of your organization.

The questions that you will encounter in this section will challenge your knowledge in:

• Defining the AWS shared responsibility model

• Defining AWS Cloud security and compliance concepts

• Identifying AWS access management capabilities

• Plus, identifying resources for security support

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains – Technology

The third domain is all about the different services and features in AWS. It is the biggest domain in the exam, with 33 percent coverage. This includes the wide selection of computing services, storage services, networking services, database services, and other products in Amazon Web Services. Therefore, you must devote a significant amount of time studying the various concepts covered in this section.

You should prepare for:

• Defining methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud

• Defining the AWS global infrastructure

• Identifying the core AWS services, and

• Identifying resources for technology support

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains – Billing and Pricing

The last exam domain revolves around the overall cost of running your systems in the cloud. This includes the billing options and pricing types in AWS such as the concept of Pay-As-You-Go Pricing, Consolidated Billing, Capacity Reservations, Support Plans, and the different payment options for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. This segment only comprises 16% of the exam coverage, so you have to limit the time you spend reviewing the concepts under this domain. This section tests your knowledge in:

• Comparing and contrasting the various pricing models for AWS, which includes the pricing model for On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances

• Recognizing the various account structures in relation to AWS billing and pricing, as well as

• Identifying resources available for billing support

Before starting your exam preparations, you should be familiar with these four exam domains and their respective task statements. Take note that the Cloud Practitioner exam is primarily focused on cloud technology, so make sure that you focus on the “Technology” domain and all the related knowledge areas in its task statements.

I highly recommend that you read the official exam guide for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam from cover to cover. Pay close attention to the topics included, and don’t forget to read the Appendix section, which contains a list of related AWS services that will appear in the exam.

The official exam guide contains a list of key tools, technologies, and concepts that may show up on the Cloud Practitioner test. Keep in mind that this is just a non-exhaustive list of the tools and technologies that may or may not appear on the exam. This list can change at any time and is primarily given to test-takers to help them understand the general scope of services, features, or technologies for this certification. In addition, the general tools and technologies in this list appear in no particular order.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Topics

Here are the topics, AWS services, and concepts that you should focus on for your upcoming exam. You have to review your knowledge on:

• APIs

• Cost Explorer

• AWS Cost and Usage Report

• AWS Command Line Interface or AWS CLI

• Elastic Load Balancers

• Amazon EC2 instance types

• AWS global infrastructure

• Infrastructure as Code or IaC

• Amazon Machine Images or AMIs

• AWS Management Console

• AWS Marketplace

• AWS Professional Services

• AWS Personal Health Dashboard

• AWS Service Health Dashboard

• Security groups

• AWS Service Catalog



• Service quotas

• AWS software development kits or AWS SDKs

• AWS Support Center

• AWS Support tiers

• Virtual private networks or VPNs

Remember that out of the 4 exam domains, the Technology domain has the biggest coverage in the exam, at 33 percent. This means that a third of the questions in the entire AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam covers the many cloud services and features in AWS. Most of these AWS services can be grouped according to their primary functions or use cases, such as Analytics, Application Integration, Compute, Database, Networking, et cetera.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam – Related AWS Services

The Appendix section of the exam guide also includes a list of relevant AWS services that you should focus on, so in your exam, make sure that you review the following AWS services.

For Analytics, we have Amazon Athena, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon QuickSight.

For Application Integration, you should know the use cases for Amazon Simple Notification Service and Amazon Simple Queue Service.

For Computing services, study AWS Batch, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, Amazon Lightsail, and Amazon WorkSpaces.

For Containers, make sure you know Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, and AWS Fargate.

For Databases, you have Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and other cloud databases in AWS.

For Developer Tools, familiarize yourself with the CI/CD services in AWS, namely the AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeStar.

The Amazon Connect service is also covered, which is commonly used for Customer Engagement activities.

The Cloud Practitioner exam covers a handful of services that relates to Management, Monitoring, and Governance. These are: AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Budgets, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Amazon EventBridge, AWS License Manager, AWS Managed Services, AWS Organizations, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, and the AWS Trusted Advisor.

For Networking and Content Delivery category, you have Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon VPC.

For Security, Identity, and Compliance category, prepare to see a range of AWS services that you can use to secure your enterprise applications and AWS resources. Check out the AWS Artifact service, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudHSM, Amazon Cognito, Amazon Detective, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Identity and Access Management or IAM, Amazon Inspector, AWS License Manager, Amazon Macie, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF.

Pay attention to how these services work together and know the appropriate AWS service to use for a particular business case or situation.

Lastly, don’t forget to study the plethora of cloud storage services at your disposal, such as AWS Backup, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon S3, Amazon S3 Glacier, AWS Snowball Edge, and AWS Storage Gateway.