AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Tips

In this article, I will talk to you about the study methods such as courses, documentation, recommendations, and secret tips to pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification (CLF). But first, I’d like to guide you through what the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification is about. In summary, the mentioned certification above is the foundation certification provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) where we will be able to know what cloud computing is and how it’s used in AWS, what the advantages of cloud computing architecture are, and the differences between on-premise architecture, which are and for what the cloud computing services in the AWS platform are used. But the most important is to know when, where and how to use the different AWS services in your architecture. It’s important to point out that this is the entry-level for AWS certifications catalog, followed by Associate and Professional level and finally, Specialties certifications.

Let’s dive in now that you have some context. I will guide you through some courses, documentation, and tips that will help you achieve this certification goal to scale up your professional career with the most important certification in the IT industry in the past 5 years.

Courses

Currently, there are many courses on the internet about cloud computing on different Cloud Providers, but I chose to study on the A Cloud Guru platform where you can find a dedicated course to this certification exam called AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner 2020. This course is very useful for the certification because the people in charge of the platform are AWS Cloud Certified and they are always updated about the last questions in the exam. The mentioned course is contained in 7 chapters that are the following.

1. Introduction
2. Cloud Concepts and Technology
3. Billing & Pricing
4. Security In The Cloud
5. Advanced AWS Concepts
6. Chapter 5 — Mega Quiz
7. Summary & Good Luck!

I will talk a bit about each chapter of the course above.

• Introduction: This chapter talks about the course content, some of our course instructors, and new features in the A Cloud Guru Platform.
• Cloud Concepts and Technology: This chapter teaches us about Cloud Computing and some services in the AWS platform such as IAM, EC2, S3, Databases, CloudWatch… Also has 2 hands-on labs and 1 Quiz.
• Billing & Pricing: This chapter aims to talk about how to work the AWS services prices and informs us which are those services like AWS Organizations, Budgets, Calculators, Support Levels and additionally, it has a Quiz.
• Security In The Cloud: This chapter teaches us about the shared responsibility model and some security services in the AWS platform such as AWS WAF, Trusted Advisor, Guarduty, AWS Shield… It also has a quiz.
• Advanced AWS Concepts: This chapter has 2 important topics in the certification like AWS VPC and Lambdas, in addition, it has a hands-on lab.
• Chapter 5 — Mega Quiz: This chapter is very important because it has a mega Quiz where we apply the learned content in the previous chapters.
• Summary & Good Luck!: This final chapter is exciting because it talks about getting the certification exam in the AWS training and certification site and, furthermore, it has a simulated exam with 65 questions and time (90 minutes) to finish it.

Note: It is not necessary to have an AWS account to take this course, because the A Cloud Guru platform has a new feature called Playground where you can make the hands-on labs of each chapter. This is the course in the A Cloud Guru platform.

Additionally, you might consider taking a course in the Coursera platform to reinforce some AWS services concepts. This course is called AWS Cloud Technical Essentials. The mentioned course is provided by AWS in the Coursera Platform given by 2 Senior Cloud Technologists that are in the AWS Training and Certification program. I recommend this course because it has some awesome hands-on labs and many AWS documentation for each module — “This is a very good course for a beginner”. The mentioned course has 4 weeks (Modules) of the following way.

1. Week 1: This module talks about AWS, IAM, AWS Shared Responsibility Model, and also has 1 hands-on lab, a quiz, and 9 documentation items.
2. Week 2: This module teaches us about EC2, Serverless, VPC, Lambdas… Besides, it has 1 hands-on lab, a quiz, and 10 documentation items.
3. Week 3: This module aims to make us know about the storage types on AWS like S3, EBS, Databases… It has additionally 1 hands-on lab, a quiz, and 10 documentation items.
4. Week 4: This is the final module of the course. It talks about Cloudwatch, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling Group… In addition, it has 2 hands-on labs, a quiz, and 6 documentation items.

Note: It is necessary to have an AWS Account to follow up on the hands-on labs of each module. This is the course on the Coursera platform.

Documentation

The courses are not enough to pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification, thus you need to have a good base of Knowledge from the AWS official documentation. We have followed the next documentation.

• It is important to know how AWS pricing works, this is the official documentation.
• It is necessary to have clear what is the AWS Well-Architected Framework, you can see it in this documentation.
• You need to know about AWS Codecommit because the courses do not talk about it and if in the certification, this is the documentation.
• You need to know about AWS Codedeploy because the courses do not talk about it and if in the certification, this is the documentation.

Recommendations

I also recommend following up on the next points to pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification.

• You should take note of each AWS service and concept taught in the mentioned courses above or in the AWS official documentation.
• Make every hands-on lab in the courses I shared in this article. They are not too many and will provide a huge help.
• Realize the A Cloud Guru course’s simulated exam above more than once with results of over 90% before performing the official exam.
• You should have at least 6 experience months using the AWS cloud platform services.
• The next AWS services are the more important in the certification exam:

EC2, S3, VPC, RDS, DynamoDB, RedShift, Elasticache, ELB, AutoScalingGroup, IAM, Cloudwatch, Lambda, CDN, Edge Locations, Regions, Amazon Shield, Direct Connection, Cloudtrail, Amazon Inspector, DocumentDB, SNS, CloudFormation, Costs Security, Trusted Advisor, Calculator, Responsibility Shared.

• The categories that you need to pass the certification exam are:

Compute

Storage

Databases

Security, Identity & Compliance

AWS Cost Management

Summary

The ideas throughout this article are to let you know that there is not only a study method to pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification, but we also wanted to keep you clear about the used by me and the idea is that you can pass the exam certification with it. Also, I took the time to leave some important notes obtained during my exam preparation here and I expect that to help you.

Thank you for reading this article and don’t forget that you can!