AWS Cloud Practitioner Practice Exam

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam has been developed to assess the fundamental understanding of AWS Cloud concepts, services, and terminology.

Who should take the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam?

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is a good way to begin in non-technical roles with no prior IT or cloud experience or for those with on-premises IT experience looking for basic AWS Cloud fluency.  The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam is suitable for -

• Candidates from a non-IT background and exploring a career in the AWS Cloud
  
• Candidates working in sales/marketing/business analyst roles looking to communicate more effectively with stakeholders and customers about the AWS Cloud
• Candidates working in on-premises IT or cloud roles, but new to AWS Cloud, and need a primer before diving into role-based AWS Certification(s)

Knowledge Acquired

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner imparts the following knowledge  - 

• Fundamental understanding of IT services and their uses on AWS Cloud
  
• Core Knowledge of AWS services and use cases, billing and pricing models, security concepts, and how cloud impacts your business

Recommended AWS knowledge

The candidate planning to take the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam should be acquainted with the following concepts - 

• AWS Cloud concepts
• Security and compliance within the AWS Cloud
• Understanding of the core AWS services
• Understanding of the economics of the AWS Cloud

Exam Details

• Exam Name: AWS Cloud Practitioner 
• Exam Code: CLF-C01
• Exam Duration: 90 minutes
• Exam Language: English
• Type of Questions: Multiple Choice and Multiple Responses
• Passing Score: 700

Course Outline

The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam covers the following topics - 

Domain 1 - Overview of Cloud Concepts

1.1 Explain the AWS Cloud and its value proposition

Understanding the benefits of the AWS cloud  

• Security
• Reliability
• High Availability
• Elasticity
• Agility
• Pay-as-you go pricing
• Scalability
• Global Reach
• Economy of scale

Understanding how the AWS cloud allows users to focus on business value

• Learn shifting technical resources to revenue-generating activities as opposed to managing infrastructure

1.2 Explain and Identify aspects of AWS Cloud economics

Understanding items that would be part of a Total Cost of Ownership proposal

• Learn the role of operational expenses (OpEx)
• Learn the role of capital expenses (CapEx)
• Learn the labor costs associated with on-premises operations
• Learn the impact of software licensing costs when moving to the cloud

Understand and Identify which operations will reduce costs by moving to the cloud

• Learn the right-sized infrastructure
• Learn the benefits of automation
• Learn the reduce compliance scope (for example, reporting)
• Learn the managed services (for example, RDS, ECS, EKS, DynamoDB)

1.3 Explain the different cloud architecture design principles

Understand the design principles

• Learn design for failure
• Learn decouple components versus monolithic architecture
• Learn to implement elasticity in the cloud versus on-premises
• Learn to think parallel

Domain 2: Overview of Security and Compliance

2.1 Explain the AWS shared responsibility model

• Understand and recognize the elements of the Shared Responsibility Model
• Understand the customer’s responsibly on AWS and learn how the customer’s responsibilities may shift depending on the service used (for example with RDS, Lambda, or EC2)
• Understand AWS responsibilities

2.2 Explain AWS Cloud security and compliance concepts

Understand and identify where to find AWS compliance information

• Learn about the locations of lists of recognized available compliance controls (for example, HIPPA, SOCs)
• Learn and recognize that compliance requirements vary among AWS services

Understand and describe how customers achieve compliance on AWS

• Learn to identify different encryption options on AWS (for example, In transit, At rest)

Understand who enables encryption on AWS for a given service

Understand and 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)
• Learn Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail

Understand the concept of least privileged access

2.3 Explain and 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 and Policies, managed policies compared to custom policies
• Tasks that require use of root accounts Protection of root accounts

2.4 Explain and identify resources for security support

Understand and recognize there are different network security capabilities

• Native AWS services (for example, security groups, Network ACLs, AWS WAF)
• 3rd party security products from the AWS Marketplace

Understand and recognize there is documentation and where to find it (for example, best practices, whitepapers, official documents) 

• AWS Knowledge Center, Security Center, security forum, and security blogs
• Partner Systems Integrators

Understand Know that security checks are a component of AWS Trusted Advisor

Domain 3: Overview of Technology

3.1 Explain methods of deploying and operating in the AWS Cloud

Understand and Identify at a high level different ways of provisioning and operating in the AWS cloud

• Learn Programmatic access, APIs, SDKs, AWS Management Console, CLI, Infrastructure as Code

Understand and Identify different types of cloud deployment models

• All in with cloud/cloud native
• Hybrid
• On-premises

Understand and identify connectivity options

• VPN
• AWS Direct Connect
• Public internet

3.2 Explain the AWS global infrastructure

Understand the relationships among Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations

Understand how to achieve high availability through the use of multiple Availability Zones

• Learn to recall that high availability is achieved by using multiple Availability Zones
• Learn to recognize that Availability Zones do not share single points of failure

Understand when to consider the use of multiple AWS Regions

• Learn disaster recovery/business continuity
• Learn Low latency for end-users
• Learn Data sovereignty

Understand at a high level the benefits of Edge Locations

• Learn Amazon CloudFront
• Learn AWS Global Accelerator

3.3 Identify the core AWS services

Understand the categories of services on AWS (compute, storage, network, database)

Understand and identify AWS compute services

• Learn to recognize there are different compute families
• Learn to recognize the different services that provide compute (for example, AWS Lambda compared to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), or Amazon EC2, etc.)
• Learn to recognize that elasticity is achieved through Auto Scaling
• Learn to identify the purpose of load balancers

Understand and identify different AWS storage services

• Learn Amazon S3
• Learn Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Learn Amazon S3 Glacier
• Learn AWS Snowball
• Learn Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS)
• Learn AWS Storage Gateway

Understand and Identify AWS networking services

• Learn to Identify VPC
• Learn to Identify security groups
• Learn to Identify the purpose of Amazon Route 53
• Learn to Identify VPN, AWS Direct Connect

Understand and identify different AWS database services

• Learn to Install databases on Amazon EC2 compared to AWS managed databases
• Learn to Identify Amazon RDS
• Learn to Identify Amazon DynamoDB
• Learn to Identify Amazon Redshift

3.4 Explain to identify resources for technology support

• Understand and recognize there is documentation (best practices, whitepapers, AWS Knowledge Center, forums, blogs)
• Understand and identify the various levels and scope of AWS support
1. Learn about AWS Abuse
2. Learn about AWS support cases
3. Learn about Premium support
4. Learn about Technical Account Managers
• Understand and recognize there is a partner network (marketplace, third-party) including Independent  Software Vendors and System Integrators
• Understand and identify sources of AWS technical assistance and knowledge including professional services, solution architects, training and certification, and the Amazon Partner Network
• Understand and identify the benefits of using AWS Trusted Advisor

Domain 4: Overview of Billing and Pricing

4.1 Explain compare and contrast the various pricing models for AWS (for example, On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instance pricing)

• Understand and identify scenarios/best fit for On-Demand Instance pricing
• Understand and identify scenarios/best fit for Reserved-Instance pricing
1. Learn Reserved-Instances flexibility
2. Learn Reserved-Instances behavior in AWS Organizations
• Understand and identify scenarios/best fit for Spot Instance pricing

4.2 Explain the various account structures in relation to AWS billing and pricing

• Understand that consolidated billing is a feature of AWS Organizations
• Understand and identify how multiple accounts aid in allocating costs across departments

4.3 Identify resources available for billing support

Understand and identify ways to get billing support and information

• Learn Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, Amazon QuickSight, third-party partners, and AWS Marketplace tools
• Learn Open a billing support case
• Learn The role of the Concierge for AWS Enterprise Support Plan customers

Understand and identify where to find pricing information on AWS services

• Learn AWS Simple Monthly Calculator
• Learn AWS Services product pages
• Learn AWS Pricing API

Understand and recognize that alarms/alerts exist

Understand and identify how tags are used in cost allocation