CLF-C01

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Exam Learning Path

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 33 Comments

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam (CLF-C01) Learning Path

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is mainly a high-level introduction to Cloud Computing, AWS Cloud, its advantages, its services, pricing, and support plans.
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is a good exam to start your AWS journey with and also provides non-technical professionals to know what AWS has to offer.
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam has 65 questions to be answered in 100 minutes.
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is the only exam currently that can be taken online, without having to visit a test center.
  • Be sure to have a good internet connection, comfortable seating, id cards ready and you should be good to go.

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam basically validates the following

  • Define what the AWS Cloud is and the basic global infrastructure
  • Describe basic AWS Cloud architectural principles
  • Describe the AWS Cloud value proposition
  • Describe key services on the AWS platform and their common use cases (for example, compute and analytics)
  • Describe basic security and compliance aspects of the AWS platform and the shared security model
  • Define the billing, account management, and pricing models;
  • Identify sources of documentation or technical assistance (for example, white papers or support tickets); and
  • Describe basic/core characteristics of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud.

Refer to the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam guide
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Exam Domains

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Resources

AWS Cloud Computing Whitepapers

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Contents

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts

  • 1.1 Define the AWS Cloud and its value proposition
    • Agility – Speed, Experimentation, Innovation
    • Elasticity – Scale on demand, Eliminate wasted capacity
    • Availability – Spread across multiple zones
    • Flexibility – Broad set of products, Low to no cost to entry
    • Security – Compliant many compliance certifications, Shared responsibility model
  • 1.2 Identify aspects of AWS Cloud economics
    • Advantages of Cloud Computing
      • Trade capital expense for variable expense
      • Benefit from massive economies of scale
      • Stop guessing about capacity
      • Increase speed and agility
      • Stop spending money running and maintaining data centers
      • Go global in minutes
    • AWS Well-Architected Framework
      • Features include agility, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and operational excellence.
  • 1.3 List the different cloud architecture design principles

Domain 2: Security

  • 2.1 Define the AWS Shared Responsibility model
    • includes having a clear understanding of what AWS and Customer responsibilities are 
  • 2.2 Define AWS Cloud security and compliance concepts
  • 2.3 Identify AWS access management capabilities
    • includes services like IAM
  • 2.4 Identify resources for security support

Domain 3: Technology

  • 3.1 Define methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud
  • 3.2 Define the AWS global infrastructure
    • includes AWS concepts of regions, AZs and edge locations
  • 3.3 Identify the core AWS services
    • Includes AWS Services Overview and focuses on high level knowledge of (but surely not deep enough)
      • Compute Services
      • Storage Services –
        • S3 – object storage, static website hosting. Know S3 subresources esp. versioning, server access logging
        • EBS
        • EFS – shared file storage that can be shared between on-premises and AWS resources
        • Glacier – archival long term storage
      • Security, Identity, and Compliance –
        • IAM – 
        • Organizations,
        • WAF
        • AWS Inspector – automated application security assessment 
        • AWS GuardDuty – threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior to protect the AWS accounts and workloads
        • AWS Artifact – On-demand access to AWS’ compliance reports
      • Databases –
      • Migration – Database Migration Service
      • Networking and Content Delivery
        • VPC
        • CloudFront – caching and helps improve performance and reduce latency
        • Route 53 – dns and domain registration. Also understand different routing policies esp. latency for Global traffic
        • VPN & Direct Connect – provides connectivity between on-premises and AWS Cloud
        • ELB – helps distribute load across multiple resources
        • AWS Global Accelerator – Improve application availability and performance
      • Management Tools
      • Messaging – SQS, SNS
  • 3.4 Identify resources for technology support
    • includes AWS Support Models and the key features and benefits the model provides to the customers
      • know only Enterprise support plan provides
        • dedicated TAM (Technical Account Manager)
        • Well-Architected Review delivered by AWS Solution Architects
        • Account Assistance by Assigned Support Concierge
        • SLA of < 15 mins for business critical events
      • know only Business and above support plan provides
        • 24×7 access to Cloud Support Engineers via email, chat & phone
        • Full Access to Trusted Advisor checks

Domain 4: Billing and Pricing

  • 4.1 Compare and contrast the various pricing models for AWS
    • includes AWS Pricing
      • know EC2 pricing models esp. Spot and Reserved
      • know Lambda pricing which is based on invocations and time
  • 4.2 Recognize the various account structures in relation to AWS billing and pricing
  • 4.3 Identify resources available for billing support
    • includes tools like TCO Calculator which helps compare cost of running applications in an on-premises or colocation environment to AWS
    • includes Cost Explorer allows you to view and analyze costs (hint – Spend forecasting)