AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Published in

Thinkport Technology Blog

10 min readJan 17, 2021

I am not the first man who writes about that and shares his own experience but anyway would like to add some points from my side. Recently I have passed AWS CCP exam which is the foundational level covering only the basics so it is not that hard but requires to understand around 100 services (out of 184 available via AWS Management Console if one has an account) and their peculiarities. Therein actually lies the main difficulty since for the first time it seems that all services with similar purpose have no differences but it is obviously not. Some of them can include almost all the features of the other one but this is done on purpose since there is a wide variety of situations where one service fits the best and another one is just an overkill making the whole solution more expensive and even unsecured if implemented and used improperly. Moreover it requires some fundamental understanding of AWS «philosophy» — why AWS with its clouds is needed, what are the advantages over data-centers on-premises, features and implementation possibilities. So I would like to point out what one hast to pay attention to.

There are four domains and the amount of questions regarding each one can vary from exam to exam. In my case the statistics was the following:

Domain 1: Cloud Concepts — 28%
Domain 2: Security and Compliance — 24%
Domain 3: Technology — 36%
Domain 4: Billing and Pricing — 12%

Although it seems that some domains are not that important and could be skipped during the preparation there are some reviews where it is mentioned that, for example, part «Billing and Pricing» can be up to 25% of the entire exam so be careful about that.

Here is the list of courses I used to prepare. There are many many more so try to find what fits you best. I would recommend to complete the following courses in this order:

Official AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials covers almost all the topics but rather superficially and I would not rely on it that much.
Course from Linux Academy — more detailed as the first one and has its own test exam.
Udemy course with six real past exams. Especially, exam №5 and №6 are really hard. In my opinion, they are way more harder then my actual exam. To be honest, from my point of view it covers about 85–90% of all knowledge you need to posses to pass CCP successfully since all the explanations are gathered from whitepapers and dedicated landing pages for specific services. So once I performed good results on test exams, I started to go over the whitepapers and other sources and found out that most of the stuff was taken from there. Of course there is more in those whitepapers but it is most likely not for CCP— IoT, ML and other advanced topics are out of the scope of CCP. In any case if you have enough time read whitepapers as well in order to reinforce your knowledge.

Main topics:

RDS vs DynamoDB vs Redshift vs Aurora — one has to know the differences between SQL, NoSQL and data warehouse (see the meaning of data lake as well). Aurora stands aside since you have to know couple of details regarding it although it is one of the RDS’s options. How fast it is, what the availability and redundancy it has. The same applies to DynamoDB. Be aware of DAX as well.
Availability Zones vs Regions vs Edge Locations vs data-centers—just look through the definitions and it becomes clear from the first attempt.
AWS managed vs Customer managed services — memorize the list of main AWS managed services such as Lambda, DynamoDB and others. This topic appears in different forms throughout the whole exam.
Security groups vs NACL — first one is for EC2 instances, the second one is for subnets.
Private vs public subnets — one requires a little bit of knowledge in computer networks.
CloudWatch vs CloudTrail vs X-Ray—monitoring, tracking and debugging tools. All of them are used for analysis
CloudHSM vs KSM — here is a good example how important to understand the differences between AWS-managed and customer-managed services.
Organizations and Consolidated Billing—the features of both of them and how they are used together.
Pricing Calculator (Simple Monthly Calculator) vs Cost Explorer vs Budgets — all of them are for different purposes so try to understand each one.
Shared responsibility model—understand the difference between «Security of the Cloud» and «Security in the Cloud».
Autoscaling vs ELB — really dumb questions once you clarify the difference but I got caught several times on that going through test exams.
TCO — usually there is a list of options and one has to choose which imply TCO.
Support Plans — one has to know the differences between basic, developer, business and enterprise support plans. There could be several quiestions about it. Especially about Concierge, TAM and Infrastructure Event Management.
S3 classes — questions about what class to choose (Standard, Glacier, IA etc) in a given scenario are quite popular.
EC2 instances— the same applies here: there is a small description what a customer wants to achieve and several options he can use (spot, reserved, on-demand, dedicated). See what are the benefits of Savings Plan and understand the difference between Dedicated Hosts and Dedicated Instances as well.
5 Pillars of well-architected framework — really really pay attention to it. Very important topic. Try to learn main principles of each pillar. In my case on real exam I met something about Security Pillar and once I saw the words «enable traceability» I just almost instantly chose option with security. Reading specifically about each pillar in the whitepapers dedicated to them is not required although I do not discourage you.
Trusted Advisor vs Inspector vs Shield vs WAF — all of them are relevant to IT-security but at different angles and Trusted Advisor has several other features.
Connect vs Direct Connect — completely different services but because of similar names they usually come together as options in different scenarios.
Non-existent services — I met it only once on test exam, but also keep in mind it could be.
Acronyms — They will definitely try to catch you several times on knowing acronyms so you need to know what each acronym means and filter non-relevant ones. The easiest questions you could meet, I think.

Compute

EC2 — most likely**
Lightsail — could be*
Lambda — most likely**
Batch — could be*
Elastic Beanstalk — most likely*
Serverless Application Repository — unlikely
AWS Outposts — could be*
EC2 Image Builder — could be*

Containers

Elastic Container Registry — could be*
Elastic Container Service — could be*
Elastic Kubernetes Service — could be*

Storage

S3 — most likely**
EFS — most likely**
FSx — unlikely
S3 Glacier — most likely**
Storage Gateway — could be*
AWS Backup — could be*

Database

RDS — most likely**
DynamoDB — most likely**
ElastiCache — most likely*
Neptune — could be*
Amazon QLDB — unlikely
Amazon DocumentDB —could be*
Amazon Keyspaces — unlikely
Amazon Timestream — unlikely

Migration & Transfer

AWS Migration Hub — could be*
Application Discovery Service — could be*
Database Migration Service — most likely**
Server Migration Service — could be*
AWS Transfer Family — unlikely
AWS Snow Family — most likely**
DataSync — unlikely

Networking & Content Delivery

VPC — most likely**
CloudFront — most likely**
Route 53 — most likely*
API Gateway — most likely*
Direct Connect — most likely*
AWS App Mesh — unlikely
AWS Cloud Map — unlikely
Global Accelerator— could be*

Developer Tools

CodeStar — unlikely
CodeCommit — could be*
CodeArtifact — unlikely
CodeBuild — could be*
CodeDeploy — could be*
CodePipeline — could be*
Cloud9 — could be*
CloudShell — unlikely
X-Ray — most likely*

Customer Enablement

AWS IQ — unlikely
Support —most likely**
Managed Services — unlikely
Activate for Startups — unlikely

Robotics

AWS RoboMaker — unlikely

Blockchain

Amazon Managed Blockchain — unlikely

Satellite

Ground Station — unlikely

Quantum Technologies

Amazon Braket — unlikely

Management & Governance

AWS Organizations — most likely**
CloudWatch — most likely**
AWS Auto Scaling —most likely**
CloudFormation —most likely*
CloudTrail — most likely**
Config —most likely*
OpsWorks — most likely*
Service Catalog — could be*
Systems Manager — could be*
AWS AppConfig — could be*
Trusted Advisor — most likely**
Control Tower — could be*
AWS License Manager — unlikely
AWS Well-Architected Tool — most likely**
Personal Health Dashboard — could be*
AWS Chatbot — unlikely
Launch Wizard — unlikely
AWS Compute Optimizer — unlikely
Resource Groups & Tag Editor — unlikely
Amazon Grafana — unlikely
Amazon Prometheus — unlikely
AWS Proton — unlikely

Media Services

Kinesis Video Streams — unlikely
MediaConnect — unlikely
MediaConvert — unlikely
MediaLive — unlikely
MediaPackage — unlikely
MediaStore — unlikely
MediaTailor — unlikely
Elemental Appliances & Software — unlikely
Amazon Interactive Video Service — unlikely
Elastic Transcoder — unlikely

Machine Learning

Amazon SageMaker — could be*
Amazon Augmented AI — could be*
Amazon CodeGuru — unlikely
Amazon DevOps Guru — unlikely
Amazon Comprehend — could be*
Amazon Forecast — unlikely
Amazon Fraud Detector — could be*
Amazon Kendra — could be*
Amazon Lex — could be*
Amazon Personalize — unlikely
Amazon Polly — could be*
Amazon Rekognition — could be*
Amazon Textract — could be*
Amazon Transcribe —could be*
Amazon Translate — unlikely
AWS DeepComposer — unlikely
AWS DeepLens — unlikely
AWS DeepRacer — unlikely
AWS Panorama — unlikely
Amazon Monitron — unlikely
Amazon HealthLake — unlikely
Amazon Lookout for Vision — unlikely
Amazon Lookout for Equipment — unlikely
Amazon Lookout for Metrics — unlikely

Analytics

Athena — most likely*
Amazon Redshift — most likely*
EMR — most likely*
CloudSearch — could be*
Elasticsearch Service — could be*
Kinesis — could be*
QuickSight — could be*
Data Pipeline — could be*
AWS Data Exchange — unlikely
AWS Glue — unlikely
AWS Lake Formation — unlikely
MSK — unlikely
AWS Glue DataBrew — unlikely

Security, Identity, & Compliance

IAM — most likely**
Resource Access Manager — could be*
Cognito — most likely*
Secrets Manager — most likely*
GuardDuty — most likely*
Inspector — most likely**
Amazon Macie — could be*
AWS Single Sign-On — could be*
Certificate Manager — most likely*
Key Management Service — most likely**
CloudHSM — most likely**
Directory Service — could be*
WAF & Shield — most likely**
AWS Firewall Manager — unlikely
Artifact — most likely*
Security Hub — could be*
Detective — unlikely
AWS Audit Manager — unlikely
AWS Signer — unlikely

AWS Cost Management

AWS Cost Explorer — most likely**
AWS Budgets — most likely**
AWS Marketplace Subscriptions —unlikely

Front-end Web & Mobile

AWS Amplify — unlikely
Mobile Hub — unlikely
AWS AppSync — unlikely
Device Farm — unlikely
Amazon Location Service — unlikely

AR & VR

Amazon Sumerian — unlikely

Application Integration

Step Functions — unlikely
Amazon AppFlow — unlikely
Amazon EventBridge — could be*
Amazon MQ — could be*
Simple Notification Service —most likely*
Simple Queue Service —most likely*
SWF — could be*
Managed Apache Airflow — unlikely

Customer Engagement

Amazon Connect — most likely*
Pinpoint — could be*
Simple Email Service — could be*

Business Applications

Alexa for Business — unlikely
Amazon Chime — could be*
WorkMail — unlikely
Amazon Honeycode — unlikely

End User Computing

WorkSpaces — unlikely
AppStream 2.0 — unlikely
WorkDocs — unlikely
WorkLink — unlikely

Internet of Things

IoT Core — unlikely
FreeRTOS — unlikely
IoT 1-Click — unlikely
IoT Analytics — unlikely
IoT Device Defender — unlikely
IoT Device Management — unlikely
IoT Events — unlikely
IoT Greengrass — could be*
IoT SiteWise — unlikely
IoT Things Graph — unlikely

Game Development

Amazon GameLift — unlikely

*You need to know only what this service does in general. Refers to all «could be»- and some «most likely»-services

**Pay attention to this service on the first place. Refers only to «most likely»-services

References:

Сourses: